Doors
by Elisabeth Hill
Summary: Coraline Jones is no stranger to the otherworldly, the inexplicable, and the just plain weird. Amity Park may have finally met its match.
1. Chapter 1

At least it wasn't raining.

Coraline Jones pressed her forehead against the car window, staring up at the few fluffy white clouds scudding like lost sheep across a perfectly blue sky. The glass felt cool and smooth, like ice or, more specifically, like glass. Outside, rows of buildings flashed by, big-box stores and gas stations and fast-food restaurants and mechanics and the kinds of things that stand along the highway on the outskirts of every small city. Coraline's eyes glazed over and it all blended into one long, colourful streak, with occasional moments of coherency jumping out at her as she focused on something particularly interesting. The cheery sign welcoming her and her parents to Amity Park barely even warranted a glance.

From the front seat, Coraline's mother asked, "What was the address again?"

Coraline's father answered, "I thought I gave you the piece of paper I wrote it down on."

"No, you didn't."

"I didn't?"

"Well, I don't have it." Coraline's mother made a noise that was halfway between a snort and a sigh. "How are we going to find the house now?"

Coraline sighed and slouched down into her seat, so that she could just see the skyline over the car door. They'd be having this same argument until they actually found the house, going round in circles, both getting defensive and blaming the other until neither could bring themselves to speak to the other, filling the car up with hot stuffy angry silence that drowned out even thoughts. She turned her glare onto the totally innocent horizon.

And sat up bolt upright when something flashed across it.

"Did you see that?" she demanded of her father, who turned to look at her, pushing his glasses up his long nose, and her mother, who glanced at her in the rearview mirror before turning her attention back to the road.

"See what?" her mother asked.

Coraline opened and shut her mouth, realizing she had no idea how to describe whatever it was. "It was…big," she settled for. "Big and – and _pink_. And it was shooting straight up into the sky." It sounded rather weak and pathetic, and she stopped before trying to describe to her obviously disbelieving parents the way…whatever it was had zipped across her field of vision, moving far too fast and lightly for something so massive, and just as quickly disappeared.

"Nevermind," she mumbled to her mother's incredulous stare and her father's mildly bemused gaze. "It was just a thing."

"Probably an airplane," her father volunteered. "I'm sure there's an airport around here somewhere."

"If there was, we wouldn't have had to _drive_ all the way from Oregon," Coraline's mother grouched. Coraline, recognizing the argument starting up again, sank back into her seat, staring accusingly out the window as if daring her new hometown to give up its secrets.

It obliged.

"There!" Coraline shouted, pointing out the window. "Did you see that?"

"No, Coraline," her mother snapped. "I did not see your mysterious pink thing. I was busy driving, and looking for a turnoff that _someone_ should have found on the map _before_ we got into town."

"You don't have to get all snippy about it," Coraline muttered, but without real venom. She was too busy staring out the window, her palms now pressed against the glass as she searched for any sign of whatever it was that she'd seen.

"You make a left turn here, and then a right at the four-way stop," Coraline's father offered helpfully.

"Left at the next intersection?"

"No, here."

The little blue Bug veered sharply to the left, giving Coraline a clear view of her mysterious pink thing as it swooped over the rooves of downtown and dipped out of sight. Seconds later, something much smaller and dark against the beautiful blue of the sky followed it, streaking along the horizon and then vanishing before she was even sure she'd really seen it.

Coraline's face stayed pressed against the window all the way into the residential neighbourhoods, but neither of the flying things reappeared.

"Where are we supposed to be going, then?"

"Well, you wrote down the address."

"Great. Just peachy. Maybe if we drive around all night, we'll eventually see the moving van and we can follow them!"

"It's just going down that street," Coraline volunteered. Both of her parents turned to look at her.

"Which street?" her mother asked, stamping on the brake and coming to a halt in the middle of the road.

"This one on our right that you just passed," Coraline answered. Her mother threw the car into reverse and backed up quickly, stopping again in the middle of the street, then jerking around and tearing off after the moving van. Coraline reflected that it was really a miracle that her mother hadn't gotten them all into a fatal car accident yet. They'd only had three minor fender-benders on the way here from Ashland, and no one had been injured yet, which was a new record. Coraline's mother seemed to take out her ever-present annoyance on the road and its other occupants whenever she got behind the wheel.

"Why did you stop working at the catalogue, again?" she wondered aloud as row after row of nearly identical brownstone houses and miniature pseudo-Victorian mansions flickered past. Having lived in a real Victorian mansion, Coraline found that she was severely unimpressed. "I thought you were going to be working there forever."

"Well, it's like you said," her mother answered, without looking away from the moving van she was tailing with undue ferocity. "I really do hate gardening."

"Yeah, but…paranormal phenomena?" Coraline leaned against the window so that she could see ahead, past her father's ear, to the moving van's tail end. "I didn't think you liked that kind of stuff either."

"I don't. It's all a load of bunk." Coraline's mother peered around the moving van. "But this magazine was offering a very good price for an article on one of America's most haunted places. And when you're working freelance, you have to take money where you can get it."

"I don't think Coraline really needs to hear about our financial situation, dear," Coraline's father said mildly.

"Well, she asked," Coraline's mother answered. "And your gardening book is no nearer to being done than it was when we left Pontiac."

"So you don't think there are really any ghosts in Amity Park?" Coraline asked, idly, as they turned a left and beetled down the next street.

"I highly doubt it," her mother said, flatly.

The moving van's brake lights blazed red, and Coraline's mother stamped on the brakes, throwing Coraline forward into the back of her father's seat. Coraline barely managed to catch herself, and braced herself as the car lurched forward in a series of stops and starts. She wondered if her mother had ever learned to drive a standard properly.

"What," Coraline's mother asked, her voice stiff with disbelief and disapproval, "is _that_?"

Coraline leaned as far across the seat as her seatbelt would allow, but all she could see was the tail end of the moving van. Her father, likewise, was leaning over in hopes of seeing whatever it was. "What's what, dear?" he asked mildly, craning his long neck to try to see around the moving van.

Coraline's mother shook her head. "I don't – it just -" She shook her head again. "You're going to have to see this for yourselves."

"Is it a ghost?" Coraline asked, half-hopefully, knowing what the answer would be.

"Of course not," her mother answered shortly, as she swerved in to hug the pavement. She spent a moment fiddling with the gear stick, and then turned the key in the ignition. There was a faint whine as the engine cooled down. "You might as well get out; it looks like we're here."

Coraline didn't see anything particularly interesting as she piled out of the back of the Bug, grabbing her satchel as she did so and slinging it across her shoulder. There was just an ordinary street, lined with ordinary houses, if you could call identical Frankenhouses ordinary. A perfectly ordinary moving van sat parked at the curb, obscuring her view of the other side of the street.

Two men came out of the van, opened the back end, and walked inside. Moments later, they came out carrying a sofa. She watched them start across the street, only to stop in the very middle of it, set the sofa down, and then pick it up, carry it back to the moving van, close it up, get back inside, and drive away, giving Coraline an unobstructed view of the thing that had caused her mother so much distress.

The moving van turned a U at the end of the street, and pulled up in front of the house next to the three-story-tall, nightmarish … building on the corner. Pipes and satellite dishes and various other unidentifiable mechanical things stuck haphazardly from the roof, which had apparently had had some sort of observatory built on top of it by a mad scientist. Foot-tall letters, illuminated by garish blinking lights, announced to the world at large and the neighbourhood in particular that this was FentonWorks, whatever that meant.

Coraline's father, standing beside her, scratched his head. "That is almost definitely not built to code," he commented.

"What is that monstrosity?" her mother snapped. "Never mind, I don't want to know." She got back into the car, muttering something about more crazy neighbours, and slammed the door behind her.

Coraline just grinned.

* * *

AN: Aha. I'm alive? I'm alive.

This is part of a crossover fic I started nearly two years ago. It may never be finished, but I put time and effort into what little there is of it right now, and I want it to be available for people who are not me to read and hopefully enjoy.


	2. Chapter 2

Her mother was so furious that she barely tipped the moving men at all.

"They shouldn't have parked on the wrong side of the street," she said, when Coraline's father looked like he might ask. "And they didn't even bother to take any of these boxes upstairs! We're living in a warehouse!"

Coraline, looking around at the jumble of furniture and cardboard containers surrounding her like a maze, had to admit that her mother was at least half-right.

"Of all the incompetent, blundering nincompoops we could have hired to move halfway across the country…" Coraline's mother's voice faded as she climbed the stairs to the second story.

Coraline's father dug about in the piles of boxes until he found the one containing his computer and supplies, and left the main hall with it, whistling softly as he did. Coraline knew that as soon as he found an outlet, he'd plug it all in and start working on the ever-present gardening book, completely forgetting about the cardboard pyramids inhabiting the main room and the hall until he had to go out for something else, at which point he'd trip over a box and bring it all down with a crash.

She sighed, and sat down on a sofa that was half-in, half-out of the living room. She wouldn't be exploring this house until they'd packed at least a few of their things away, and she could actually move. So, instead, she fished through the drifts of household detritus until she found her suitcase and the smallish box holding her personal things. Picking both up, she made her way through the hall and up the stairs.

The upstairs was absolutely bare, in the way houses are when no one lives in them. There was no furniture or decoration, but beyond that, something else was missing, some soul or personality or something. All the rooms seemed slightly larger than they would when filled with stuff, larger and emptier and slightly creepy, like they were waiting hungrily for something to fill them.

After two moves, Coraline was getting used to the feeling. She gave each of the rooms nothing more than a cursory glance, stopping at the smallest room on the end of the hall. Standing in the doorway, she noticed that the room had a wide window-seat that looked out onto the alley behind the house and the mysterious building next door.

"This looks nice," she said aloud, to no one in particular, and, walking in, plonked her box and suitcase down on the window-seat. Sitting down beside it, she crossed her legs and opened the box.

Out came the photo of her friends from Michigan, followed by a snapshot of Wybie holding a slug up to the camera, and a few pictures of the girls she'd known from school. This was followed by the stone with a hole in it, and a handful of interesting pebbles for camouflage, just in case. She took out a snow globe without the standard little plastic snowman in the bottom, a preying mantis-shaped photo stand, and a stuffed octopus, leaving the box empty.

Coraline frowned. Where had she left her flashlight? She checked her satchel, but it wasn't there. She must have left it in the backseat of the car. It wasn't hugely important in the middle of the afternoon, but she liked to know where all of her explorer's gear was at any given time.

Coraline took a moment to consider things. She'd be starting the ninth grade this year, and carrying around an explorer's gear at all times might be considered just a little unusual. Maybe she was, as her mother had said, getting too old for this exploring nonsense. Then again, it never hurt to have bandaids and a flashlight and things around. You never knew when you might need them. And it never hurt to know where you were, and where everything was around you. In fact, if you really thought about it, her exploring habits were more mature than they were immature.

Satisfied with her logic, Coraline set off back down the stairs. She wanted to get to know her new neighbourhood.

…

After what felt like an eternity of carrying boxes and furniture from one room to another, Coraline's mother threw both hands in the air and exclaimed that they might as well not have done any unpacking at all, because there was no way they could get the furniture into the rooms it belonged in without moving all the boxes stacked on top first, and there was nowhere to put the boxes except right where the furniture had to go. Coraline managed to sneak out the door while her parents were bickering about whether they should attempt to get the house set up tonight, or whether they should take a break and make dinner instead.

The sun was starting to dip towards the horizon by the time Coraline found her way back to the new house. The whole neighbourhood was a maze of cul-de-sacs and awkwardly laid-out streets, full of identical houses. She'd have gotten lost for sure if it hadn't been for the tangle of satellite dishes peeking over the rooves. As it was, she'd panicked a few times before realizing that her new neighbours were as good as, if not better than, a compass.

The door creaked ominously as Coraline swung it open. The boxes stacked in pyramids that crowded the entryway made it seem dim and stuffy inside, and she concluded that her parents had decided dinner was a higher priority than unpacking. The single light fixture in the middle of the ceiling seemed all but overwhelmed, its glow merely casting weird and frightening shadows up the walls.

"Anybody home?" Coraline called down the hall. "Mom? Dad? I'm back."

"Oh, good. I'm in the kitchen; dinner's here." Coraline's mother's voice wafted in from the kitchen, and Coraline smiled. It was nice to have something familiar in the middle of this spooky unfamiliar atmosphere. And here in the dark hallway, it was somehow a lot easier to believe in ghosts than it had been under the bright noon sun.

She squeezed past a pile of boxes labeled _Clothes, shoes, and assorted articles: Master bedroom_ and into the kitchen. Her mother was sitting at the table, surrounded by more boxes and pieces of furniture, including a dresser Coraline recognized as her own. A large pepperoni pizza sat steaming gently on the table in front of her. Coraline's mother gestured towards it. "Have as much as you like, because this is dinner. Your father wanted to make something, but I got him to order pizza instead."

Just in case, Coraline looked carefully to make sure her mother had eyes and not buttons. She knew she was being silly, but it never hurt to make sure. "How did you manage to convince him? I thought he'd banned all mention of fast food under his roof," she said, as she grabbed a piece of pizza and took a bite, savouring it in all of its hot, greasy, cheesy goodness.

"Well, we haven't got many groceries with us, and all of our cooking supplies and food preparation things are somewhere under a bed and several years' worth of cookbooks. I just put my foot down and refused to unpack one more thing tonight. We'll use the sleeping bags if we have to, I am not moving one more blessed box." Coraline's mother grimaced.

Coraline winced in sympathy. She didn't really want to move any more stuff tonight either. Just for today, they could take a break, and tackle the heavy stuff in the morning, when they were all feeling fresher and less frazzled. When the foyer didn't seem quite so…haunted.

Coraline forced her thoughts back into line. This was a nice, normal house in the middle of a nice, fairly normal neighbourhood. There was no good reason for it to have any restless spirits kicking around. Unless, of course, someone had thought it was a good idea to build on an ancient Indian burial ground, or one of the construction workers had suffered a fatal workplace accident, or –

"Uh, mom?" Coraline asked tentatively. "Why do they think Amity Park is the most haunted town in the country?"

Her mother shrugged, and reached for another piece of pizza. "I'm sure I don't know." She looked up at Coraline, and cracked a grin. "Maybe it's a pleasant place for ghosts to raise their kids."

Coraline laughed. "Maybe it's handy for the buses."

Her mother snorted. "But seriously, Coraline, I doubt that there's anything really unusual about this town. There's a rational explanation for just about everything, if you only take the time to look for it."

Coraline nodded in agreement, but couldn't help thinking that sometimes that rational explanation didn't quite mesh with 'normal' reality. She thought of the snow globe in her new room upstairs, empty except for water and the swirling snow, and wondered again if her parents had any recollection of what had actually happened in their old apartment. Somehow, she doubted it.

She finished off the last few bites of her pizza, leaving the crust in the lid of the pizza box, and smiled at her mother. "I'll go tell Dad that dinner's ready, and then I think I'll get my sleeping bag set up in my room."

Her mother nodded. "I believe he's in the living room, typing away on that old beast of a computer. If you can get him away from it, I'll be very impressed."

Coraline smiled to herself as she squeezed out into the foyer. Stepping around the pile of boxes blocking the doorway was like stepping into a refrigerator, and Coraline shivered as the cold air hit her bare arms, instantly covering them with goose pimples. She peered around the drifts of neglected belongings, and saw that the door was standing wide open.

"Did I forget to close it?" she asked the house in general, and began to pick her way between boxes and bags and large pieces of furniture. Halfway to the door, she noticed the box labelled _Camping Supplies_ in her mother's untidy scrawl, sitting on top of a heavy, dark side-table that they'd inherited from Coraline's great-grandmother. If the sleeping bags were anywhere, they'd be there.

Coraline wound her way to the door, shut it tightly, and considered locking it. Finally, she decided against it, and made her way toward the living room, being careful not to disturb anything too much. She grabbed the cardboard container of camping supplies from the end table as she passed by, and gave a small, stifled scream when it was yanked unceremoniously out from under her arm.

She stood stock-still in the middle of the foyer, trying to convince herself that when she turned around the box would have caught on part of the end table and would have spilled camping supplies all over the floor. She repeated it to herself over and over again, but somehow still didn't want to turn around.

Finally, she decided that if she didn't do something she'd be standing in the middle of the foyer until the next morning, and, clenching her hands into fists, she turned around.

The box of camping supplies was sitting on the table, caught by a protruding tent-peg on a deep score in the table's surface.

Coraline breathed out, feeling both relieved and oddly disappointed. She reached out to grab the box, and fell forward onto the table as her arms swept through empty space.

Winded, Coraline leaned against the end table, glaring at the camping supplies box. It hadn't been her imagination – the box had _moved_, jumped forward out of her grasp all on its own.

"All right," Coraline muttered, "I don't know what's going on, but I'm not going to take this kind of nonsense from a cardboard box!" She dove for it again, only to see it leap off the table and land with a crash on the floor, spilling out a tent and a set of pegs, a storm lantern, and a jumble of sleeping bags and rope.

Coraline groaned, and kneeled down, picking up the fallen camping supplies. "This is not a good start to a new town and a new school year," she grumbled, as she packed everything back into its box.

From somewhere behind her, just on the edge of her hearing, she could swear she heard faint, decidedly ghostly laughter.


	3. Chapter 3

Her new high school was called Casper High.

"That seems in rather poor taste," Coraline's mother commented, looking at the sign over the double doors leading into the school.

Coraline, slumped against the passenger-side window, shrugged. Watching students pile in through the double doors, she felt as though the omelette she'd eaten that morning might make a reappearance. There were entirely too many letter jackets and pom-poms in that crowd. But what worried her more was the gigantic crater in the school's front lawn, cordoned off with neon orange snow fence. Two men in yellow hard hats were sitting on a front-end loader behind the fence, eating sandwiches. As Coraline watched, they turned to look at the little blue Bug, then, uninterestedly, turned away again.

"Well, 'twere best it were done quickly," Coraline's mother said, and opened her door. Coraline sighed heavily, and pushed her door open as well.

"Might as well get this over with."

Her mother looked briefly up at the sky. "Coraline, I'm sure you'll be just fine. You put up a huge fuss about your other school too, and look how many friends you made there!"

"Two," Coraline muttered.

But she let herself be dragged down seemingly endless locker-lined hallways, smelling of sweat and old lunches and stale school spirit, past classroom after classroom, her footsteps sounding oddly loud in the hush of the hallways during class. Her mother didn't seem to notice, barrelling ahead towards the office, pulling Coraline helplessly along in her wake.

The office, at the very end of the hall, was entirely enclosed, without a single window. Coraline took one look at the football trophies and the certificates framed on the walls, and groaned silently to herself.

The principal was not quite what Coraline had expected. She'd expected a former gym teacher or possibly ex-Marine, maybe with an impressive moustache. She hadn't been prepared for an aging, out-of-shape beatnik with an utterly ridiculous goatee.

"We'd like to see the principal," Coraline's mother said, without a greeting.

"I'm afraid Principal Ishiyama is in a meeting. Come in, sit down." He smiled too much, Coraline decided. "I'm Mr. Lancer, the vice-principal of this fine establishment. You must be Caroline," the vice-principal greeted her, and Coraline reminded herself not to glare. First day. New school. Good impression. Right.

"It's Coraline," she corrected him. "Coraline Jones."

"Coraline. Right. And you would be Mrs. Jones?"

Coraline's mother nodded. "Can we just get her registered? Not that it isn't very kind of you to welcome us in, of course, but I have an interview in ten minutes."

"Of course, of course." Coraline crossed her arms and slouched down in her seat. It was taking real willpower not to roll her eyes every time her new vice-principal spoke. He rummaged in the filing cabinet drawers for a moment, then triumphantly pulled free a slim folder. "Here we are. Now if you'd just sign here, Mrs. Jones, and here and here and here…"

Coraline's mother took the pen she was offered and began to scribble her signature on the dotted lines. Coraline looked around for a window, remembered there wasn't one, and settled for shifting uncomfortably in her chair.

"Well, thank you, Mr. Lancer," Coraline's mother said, dotting the last_ i_ with a noise like a gunshot. "I've got to run. Coraline, have fun, learn lots, and _stay out of trouble_." She stood up, ruffled Coraline's hair despite Coraline's protests, and left, pausing only to wave from the doorway.

Coraline slouched further down in her seat, realizing again just how alone she was.

"So. Caroline."

"It's Coraline," Coraline corrected him resignedly. She knew she'd be repeating it for at least a week.

"Coraline, right." Lancer made a few what he probably thought were surreptitious notes on her file. "Coraline. We're very glad to have you here at Casper High, and I'm sure you'll fit right in."

Coraline nodded, and tried to smile easily and winningly. It turned out more twitchy and suspicious than charming and reassuring, and she stopped.

"In fact, I don't mind telling you that Casper High is one of the finest schools in the country. And I'm sure you're eager to become part of our proud tradition of excellent students." He smiled rather hopefully at Coraline, who grinned back awkwardly.

"Well then." Lancer flipped through the file, pulling out a few pieces of paper. "Here is your schedule, a map, your locker assignment, and of course your list of unpaid fees. Have your parents get a cheque to me as soon as possible for that last one." Coraline shuffled the papers together until she had a reasonably good grip and could actually see in front of her. "Any questions?"

"I was wondering," Coraline began, a little apprehensively, "what happened to the front yard. Why is there a massive hole in it?"

The smirk did a quick 180 and became a frown, which quickly upswung again into what would have been a smile if it had reached his eyes. "That? It's nothing to worry about. One-time freak accident, once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, couldn't possibly happen again and endanger anyone at this school."

"Yes, but what_ happened_?" Coraline pressed. She could tell from the look on Lancer's face that he would rather not be having this conversation, but she wanted to know.

"Oh, nothing. A meat truck making deliveries to the cafeteria exploded."

"Exploded?"

Lancer stared at a point just above her left ear. "Oh, look at the time. Did you have any other questions? No? Well, you'd better get to class. First period's about to end." And, before she knew what was going on, Coraline found herself out in the hall, clutching an armful of papers, as the office door slammed shut behind her.

A bell rang loud and shrilly, and classrooms up and down the hall burst open, unleashing a flood of students into the hall. Coraline let herself be carried away by the prevailing current. She'd worry about going where she needed to go once the halls were a little emptier and she actually had room to breathe.

…

Somehow, she managed to stumble through the morning, and she only got lost three times – once looking for her locker, once looking for a class, which led to her coming in late and having to explain to the teacher in front of the whole class that yes, no matter what it said on the attendance sheet, her name really wasn't Caroline, and once looking for the cafeteria. Oddly enough, her locker was the easiest to find.

The cafeteria had that universal smell of cafeterias everywhere – the one that you couldn't be certain of whether it was coming from the food, or if it had wandered in from the locker rooms. Coraline stood in line and was rewarded with a plateful of greyish-greenish mushy stuff. She did her best not to make a face as it slipped out of the ladle and onto her plate with a splortchy plop, and wondered vaguely if her father's 'recipes' might not be so awful after all.

With that hurdle vaulted, she turned to the cafeteria and faced the part of the first day in a new school that she dreaded most: finding somewhere to sit. Sitting alone would either attract a few kindly souls, or label her automatically as a social pariah. But just plunking herself down with a bunch of people who'd known each other since first grade was not an appealing option either.

"Here goes nothing," Coraline said to herself, and began the long, slow, agonizing trek across the cafeteria.

"Oh my gosh._ Blue_ hair?" someone said, from a table to Coraline's left. She glanced over, and counted two letter jackets. "Oh no, they're multiplying!"

Coraline wasn't sure what the speaker, one of the two girls at the table, meant by this, and wasn't sure she wanted to, either. She rolled her eyes and kept walking.

"I mean, one goth-geek was bad enough, but two?" the girl complained. She had a lilting accent that Coraline couldn't quite place.

"Hey, as long as those losers stick together and don't bother us," was the good-natured reply.

It was then, belatedly, that Coraline noticed the picnic tables outside. Someone up there must like her, she thought, as she headed for the doors. Now, if she could only find her way outside.


	4. Chapter 4

"And it was actually a girl? Not a dragon at all?"

"Yeah, she said something about wanting to go to a ball. So I sent her back to the Gho- oh, hi."

Coraline looked up from poking her lunch (she still hadn't made up her mind whether or not it was edible) to see three people standing beside the picnic table she'd chosen (in a nice shady spot under a tree), holding trays and looking as though she'd caught them doing something horribly embarrassing.

"Hi," she answered, guardedly. "Uh, I'm sorry. Do you guys usually sit here? Because I'm pretty much done," she said, pushing away her tray and starting to get up.

"No, it's cool," the dark-skinned kid in the red beret said quickly, putting his tray down beside hers. "I'm Tucker. Tucker Foley. But someone as gorgeous as _you_ -" he leaned in toward her, propping one elbow on the table - "can call me Tuck."

Coraline leaned back, putting as much space between them as possible. "Uh, hi. I'm Coraline. Not Caroline. Coraline."

"Coraline-not-Caroline. Got it." Tucker flashed Coraline the most ingratiating smile she'd seen since her first day at Ashland Middle School, sliding onto the bench beside her. Behind him, his friends exchanged a look. "So, Coraline. You new around here?"

Coraline nodded, despite herself. "My family just moved here from Oregon."

The dark-haired boy shrugged, and sat down across from Coraline. The gothy-looking girl rolled her eyes, but she sat down too. Coraline was very aware that she was intruding on something, but no one seemed to want to tell her flat-out to leave.

She smiled awkwardly at Tucker's friends. "So who're you?" It was probably too blunt, and she mentally smacked herself. Tact had never exactly been her strong suit.

"I'm Danny, and this is Sam," the dark-haired boy answered.

Sam crossed her arms and scowled into the middle distance. Silence, thick and awkward and suffocating, descended around the table.

"So, uh, is there anything interesting to do around here?" Coraline finally asked, more to pierce the heavy silence than out of any real desire to know. The feeling of being an intruder was making her paranoid about everything she said.

"Not unless you enjoy sports or juvenile delinquency," Sam answered shortly.

Coraline laughed, nervously. "Guess I'm going to be bored, then."

"Nah, there's lots of stuff to do," Tucker countered. "Like hit the mall, or one of the cyber-cafes, or hang out at the Nasty Burger – or go to a movie with a pretty girl," he added, sounding hopeful.

Coraline prodded the greyish lump on her tray, which rippled slightly, and then leapt abruptly upwards with a noise like a rubber boot being pulled out of particularly sticky mud. She jumped. "I'm pretty sure food's not supposed to do that."

"I'm pretty sure that's not food," Danny answered. "I'm not sure what it _is_, but nothing that comes out of that cafeteria is even remotely edible."

"Okay. Bag lunches from now on," Coraline muttered, eyeing her lunch suspiciously. It sat innocently in the middle of her plate, wobbling gently from side to side.

"At least now there's protein in it, even if it is inedible," Tucker said offhandedly, prompting a glare from Sam.

"Innocent animals should not have to suffer for the sake of your tastebuds," she shot back.

Tucker shrugged. "At least my tastebuds haven't all rebelled from being forced to eat grass."

"It was not grass!" Sam said hotly. "It was an ecologically sustainable, humane alternative meal!"

"Sam," Tucker sighed, "It was grass."

Coraline turned to Danny, who was ploughing through his lunch. "Are they always like this?"

Danny paused, swallowed, and shook his head. "Usually, they're worse."

Coraline stifled a laugh in her hand. "You guys have been friends for a while, then?"

"It was not grass!"

"It was grass on a slice of cardboard."

Danny nodded again. "Since first grade."

"Oh." Coraline prodded the greyish lump on her tray again, watching it ripple. "I guess you know most of the people at this school, then?"

"Well, so what if it was? It's still better for you than a Mighty Meaty Melt."

"Hey! What's the matter with Mighty Meaty Melts?"

Danny shrugged. "Yeah, I guess. So where in Oregon were you living?"

"Ashland." Coraline scrunched up her nose in disgust. "It is the most boring place in the whole entire United States."

"Really?"

"The most exciting thing that ever happens there is the annual Shakespeare Festival." Coraline crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. Danny winced in sympathy.

"Well, I don't think you'll have to worry about life in Amity Park being too boring," Tucker interjected, turning that same hopeful grin on Coraline.

"No, it's the excitement you'll need to worry about," Danny muttered. Coraline was about to ask him what he meant when Sam interjected, loudly.

"Ha! You're just giving up because you know I'm right," she exclaimed triumphantly, and Tucker glowered at her.

"Hey, think what you like, but I'm not giving up my meat anytime soon."

Sam looked like she was about to retort, but they were interrupted by the bell. Coraline stood up, grabbing her tray. "Oh man, I should have been getting ready ten minutes ago. Now if I get lost, I'll be late to class again."

"Hey, don't worry about it. I can walk you to class," Tucker offered, at what seemed like light speed. Coraline laughed.

"Thanks, that would be really helpful," she said. Tucker blinked at her, as if unsure he'd really heard what he thought he'd heard, and then broke into an enormous grin.

"Really? Yes!" He pumped a fist in the air, then seemed to realize Coraline was still watching. "I mean, of course." He jumped up. "Which class do you have next?"

…

"So, there's this dance next week."

Coraline shut her locker door to see Tucker, leaning against the wall and looking at her with what he probably thought was a suave and sophisticated expression on his face. Before she could roll her eyes and open the door again, he flashed her a smile. "It's going to be a huge bash, and everybody'll be there."

"Everybody except me," Coraline answered, opening her locker door.

"Aww, come on!"

Coraline's voice echoed oddly as she put her head inside her locker, digging for a textbook she was sure she'd had just a moment ago. "No. I'm not really a 'big dance' kind of girl, and besides, I don't really know anybody here."

"It's a perfect opportunity to meet people," Tucker suggested helpfully. "Of course, you already know everybody who really matters -"

"You and your friends?" Coraline caught a glimpse of the book she wanted, already in her backpack, and felt incredibly stupid.

"Yeah," Tucker answered. "But you can come with us and hang out in the corner drinking too much punch and occasionally getting mocked by passerby who somehow managed to figure out how to advance up the social ladder and therefore gain the privilege of making fun of us at every opportunity."

"And they wonder why teenagers these days have such low self-esteem," Coraline sighed, zipping her backpack shut. She tossed it over one shoulder and shut her locker door with a loud clang. "Thanks for the invitation, but I don't really feel like spending an evening being ridiculed."

"Hey, it's not all ridicule," Tucker complained, before adding brightly, "There's also punch!"


	5. Chapter 5

Coraline walked in her front door, shut it behind her, dropped her backpack on the floor, and then saw what was right in front of her. For a long moment, she just stood and stared, with her mouth slightly open.

The boxes in the foyer were no longer stacked in neat pyramids. Instead, they were all hovering slightly, hanging in midair like a tiny constellation, swaying gently from side to side. As Coraline gaped at them, they all turned to face her and then, as one, started to speed toward her.

Coraline screamed and ducked, flinging her arms over her face.

"Coraline Jones!"

There were a series of crashes, and the corner of something hard and square glanced off of Coraline's elbow. She risked a peek from under her arms to see boxes scattered around her, their contents spilled all over the floor, and her mother standing in the doorway leading to the kitchen, her arms crossed and a scowl on her face. One foot was tapping ominously against the floor.

"There had better be a good explanation for this, young lady," Coraline's mother said, her tones icy enough to sink the Titanic.

Coraline lowered her arms, slowly, straightened up, and looked around at the devastation surrounding her. Finally, at a loss for ideas, she chanced a grin at her mother, which almost instantly withered in the frost of her gaze. Coraline could tell that this wasn't going to go over well, but she took a deep breath and tried anyway.

"A ghost?"

…

"I just don't understand it. She's fourteen years old, for Pete's sake! Why can't she just accept that we're not going back, and adjust?"

Coraline's mother's voice drifted up from downstairs. Coraline sighed and scribbled down a few more steps on a math problem, then groaned and threw down her pencil. How was she supposed to focus on trigonometry when her house was haunted and her parents were blaming it all on her?

She opened up her laptop, and stared at her math homework as she waited for the computer to boot up.

From downstairs, she heard her father say, "Well, she _is _fourteen years old, and we _did_ just drag her halfway across the country just when she was starting to get settled in again."

A huff of exasperation from her mother, and the sound of a cabinet door shutting. "It's just so immature! She complained and moped around after the move to Ashland, but she seemed to be doing so well here. I just don't understand what she thinks she's going to gain from this kind of behaviour."

Coraline typed in her password and waited as her desktop slowly loaded.

"Maybe she's hoping we'll buy this story about the house being haunted and decide to move back?" her father suggested. Coraline scowled.

"Okay, first, it's not a story, and second, I can't believe you'd just assume that about me!" Coraline whisper-shouted. Downstairs, her parents continued their conversation, blissfully unaware that their daughter could hear every word. "How old do they think I am?"

There was a cheerful _ding!_ as a message popped up on Coraline's screen.

She spent the rest of the night chatting with Wybie and scouring the internet for ghost hunting tips. Most of the sites she found seemed to be a load of new age drivel, and she finally gave up in disgust.

That night, before going to bed, Coraline took the charm off of a necklace among her jewellery, and threaded the stone with the hole in it onto the chain. She fastened it around her neck, under her pyjamas. She wasn't sure if it would be very effective against ghosts, or if it would even have an effect at all, but, she figured, a little bit of extra protection never hurt.

That night, she dreamed about cats, and doors, and whispery voices on the very edge of hearing. She woke up only once, but it took her a long time to get back to sleep.

...

"Hey, you haven't said much today. Are you still asleep?"

Coraline blinked blearily and focused, with a little difficulty, on Danny. "Uh? Oh, I guess I am." She yawned and stretched, knocking her books off her desk onto the floor. "Awww, drat."

As she got up to get them, an outstretched foot was nonchalantly placed in her path and Coraline hit the floor, face-first. She scowled as laughter broke out around the room.

"Wow, that's really mature," Coraline muttered, pushing herself up into a sitting position. "Are we still in third grade?"

"That's Dash for you," Danny answered, getting up from his seat. "Body of a high-school linebacker, mind of a third-grade bully. Are you okay?"

Coraline nodded. Angry as she was that someone would bother to trip her up, she was angrier that she hadn't seen it coming. "I'm fine. I just bruised my pride a little." She started to gather up her fallen books, only to find that Danny had beaten her to it. "Oh, thanks."

"No problem." He handed her books to her, and three things happened in quick succession – their hands touched, briefly, something on Coraline's collarbone flared white-hot, and Danny yelped and jumped backwards. Coraline just barely managed to catch her books before they all fell to the ground a second time.

The classroom was deathly silent, and when Coraline looked around, all eyes were on them. Or, rather, all eyes were on Danny, who was looking at her like he'd never seen her before. Coraline looked down at herself, but nothing seemed to be out of place. Except for the stone with a hole in it, still hanging around her neck, which was glowing orange, as if cooling down from an enormous temperature.

"Wow, you, uh, have really cold hands," Danny said lamely.

"Uh, sure," Coraline agreed, eager to deflect attention from herself. "Sorry about that."

Thankfully, it was just then that Mr. Lancer walked in. "Sorry I'm late," he apologized, as everyone scrambled to get into their seats and pretend that they hadn't been frantically trying to complete their homework in the few moments before the teacher showed up. "I'm sure you all did your readings last night, so I took the liberty of printing up a pop quiz."

Groans and complaints filled the air, and life went back to normal, the weird altercation between two nobodies momentarily forgotten.

…

"So what happened in Lancer's class?"

Coraline stopped dead, a few feet from the picnic table. They hadn't seen her yet, and Tucker's voice had carried loud and clear across the open area. Part of her felt guilty for eavesdropping, but she really wanted to hear the answer, and something told her that she wasn't going to get it just by asking.

"I don't know! There's just something really weird about that new girl." Danny sounded deeply suspicious, and Coraline felt awful for about half a second before it gave way to rage. So what? Maybe there was something weird about_ him_, but it wasn't like she was randomly freaking out about it in the middle of class. Not, of course, that there really was anything particularly weird about Danny, beyond the whole 'wigging out for no reason in the middle of class' thing, but still. "All I did was brush her hand, and it was like I got an electric shock."

"Do you think she's -" Sam started, then her voice dropped and Coraline couldn't make out what she was saying any more. Danny's answer was hushed too, even though the picnic area was all but deserted.

Fuming silently to herself, Coraline took her tray and sat down at an empty table. Unfortunately, her parents hadn't gotten around to doing the grocery shopping, and she was stuck with hot lunch again. A suspicious pinkish substance that claimed, in the face of all the evidence, to be meatloaf quivered under her glare.

There was only the slightest hint of apprehension in Tucker's voice when he said, "Uh, guys? I think she heard us."


	6. Chapter 6

The last two classes went by agonizingly slowly. The bus ride home was pure torture. Coraline had almost forgotten how much she hated school buses, but all of that hatred was brought abruptly back as the overcrowded, too-warm, armpit-smelling, noisy sardine can rattled down the suburban streets, throwing everyone on board at the ceiling every time it drove over anything larger than a pebble. By the time she arrived at home, Coraline was in a worse mood than before, if that was humanly possible.

She slammed open the front door and was met by a pleasant surprise. Instead of the labyrinth of furniture and boxes that had greeted her yesterday, the foyer was empty and looked, in fact, quite welcoming.

Coraline walked in, dropping her backpack on the floor as usual, and shut the door behind her. "Mom? Dad? I'm home. And wow, have you guys been busy."

Coraline's father shuffled out of the living room in his old slippers. "Coraline! We've been hard at work all day, now it's your turn."

"Your furniture and all the boxes with your things in them are up in your room," her mother called from the living room.

Coraline perked up at the mention of furniture. "My bed too?"

"Yes, although your bedding is still packed away somewhere. Could you go and unpack and make your bed, and then call us for help if you want to move any of the furniture?"

"_Mo_-om! I'm fourteen years old, I can move my own furniture!"

Coraline's mother remained unmoved. "I don't want you hurting yourself and running up some huge hospital bill for us. Give a shout if you want something moved."

Coraline grumbled as she picked up her backpack and started toward the stairs, pausing only to give her father a hug. "Thanks."

…

Her room looked significantly less large and creepy when she walked in and saw her four-poster bed, the little dresser beside it, and her bookshelves standing against the opposite wall. But the boxes her mother had mentioned were quite definitely missing.

Coraline stood in the middle of the room, pondering, for a few seconds, before she became aware of a noise just on the edge of hearing. It sounded like faint guffaws, coming from a radio with the sound turned almost to zero and tuned slightly off-station, it echoed eerily, and it was coming from the general vicinity of the ceiling.

Dreading what she was about to see, Coraline shut her eyes and took a deep breath, balling her hands into fists. Then, before she could chicken out, she opened her eyes and looked up.

The tall closet-boxes containing all of her wardrobe that wasn't packed into her suitcase, the boxes of curtains and decorations and things she needed, and, scariest of all, boxes upon boxes of books were all hovering gently near the ceiling, slowly orbiting the ceiling lamp.

The ghostly laughter got louder.

Coraline opened her mouth, prepared to scream bloody murder, and then stopped. She was sick of being made a fool of in her own home. She was sick of not understanding things, she was sick of being in the dark, she was sick of not knowing what was going on, and she had had it with this stupid, juvenile, annoying, ridiculous _ghost!_

"Put those back!" she barked.

The boxes stopped circling, and the laughter cut off, leaving a slightly puzzled silence.

"I'm serious," Coraline threatened empty air. "Put those down right now, or I'll -" She stopped, unsure of what she could do to a ghost.

There was another moment of silence, and then the boxes all fell. This time, Coraline really did scream, and ran around frantically dodging the heavy boxes of books. A wardrobe box caught her from behind, and she fell on her face, pinned under two years' worth of clothes.

"This is so not fair," Coraline groaned, trying to push herself up on her elbows. She stopped, though, and stared in amazement as a little man appeared out of nowhere, hovering in midair a few feet in front of her.

He wasn't exactly what she'd expected from her first ghost. He wasn't wearing a white sheet, or rattling chains, or even a moldy black-and-white striped suit. He was just a little man in overalls and a knit hat, someone she wouldn't even have looked twice at on the street had he not been translucent, glowing faintly, and hovering.

As Coraline stared, he raised his arms and wiggled his fingers like a small child attempting to scare someone, and said, in a voice that despite the spooky echo sounded like it belonged in a Warner Brothers cartoon, "Beware! For I am the Box Ghost!"

"The…what?" Coraline asked, stupidly.

"The Box Ghost! Master of all things corrugated, cardboard, and square!" He flew up to Coraline until they were nearly nose-to-nose, then happily shouted, "Beware!" and, abruptly, vanished.

Coraline stared, dumbfounded, at the place where he'd been for a moment, and then remembered herself. "Oh, no you don't!" she shouted, scrambling out from under the box and looking around frantically. Echoing laughter bounced around the room, but there was no way to tell where it was coming from, and –

Coraline smacked herself in the forehead. "I am_ so_ dumb." Smiling, she unhooked her necklace and held the stone with the hole in it up to her eye. Instantly, everything faded to shades of grey – except for the little man in overalls and a knit hat, who was illuminated in a bright, almost slimy-looking sort of green, and who was blowing a raspberry at her.

"Gotcha," Coraline said excitedly. The look of dawning horror on the ghost's face was wonderful. What was not so wonderful was the way he then turned and flew out through the wall.

Coraline ran to her window just in time to see the faint green shape start down the alley. From downstairs, her mother shouted, "Coraline Jones, I _told_ you to call us if you wanted to move your furniture!"


	7. Chapter 7

slugzilla: hey where wer u last nite u didnt chat w/ me like u said u woud

jonesy: sorry. my mom gave me an hour-long lecture n then took my computer away. i couldnt get on.

slugzilla: :((((( y the lecture?

jonesy: resident ghost trashed my room.

jonesy: my mom thoght i was tryin 2 move my furniture n knocked everything over

jonesy: so now im grounded 4 a week.

slugzilla: a gost rly trashed ur room?

jonesy: i already know u think im crazy, so u dont have 2 say it again. :)

slugzilla: just sayin that sux. n if u have a ghost that moves stuff n gets u in triuble, i bet its a poltergist

slugzilla: poultergiest

slugzilla: poltergiesty

slugzilla: PEEVES

Coraline had to smother her laugh with her hand, and spent a heart-stopping moment listening to see if her parents had heard her. Then she remembered – her father was working on his gardening book, her mother on her article. They wouldn't notice if she threw a party in her room. Well, okay, maybe if she threw a party, but they definitely wouldn't notice her giggling to herself with the door shut.

jonesy: stop making me laugh, im not supposed 2 be online.

slugzilla: y didnt they jsut keep ur comp

jonesy: im using it 4 homework. ;)

slugzilla: so ur sure it's a ghost buggin u?

jonesy: ur gonna call me crazy again. :) but yeah. i even saw it.

jonesy: n it wasnt all that scary either. just kinda a jerk.

slugzilla: so wait. u actully saw it?

jonesy: yup

jonesy: not that anyone would believe me if i told them

slugzilla: :(

jonesy: :(

jonesy: anyway since im grounded 4 th week i cant go 2 this dance

slugzilla: dance?

jonesy: yeah the schools putting on this formal dance 4 the beginning of the year.

slugzilla: fromal? laaaaaaame

jonesy: yeah haha who wants 2 get all dressed up n go look at other peoples clothes n stand around drinking punch while a dj plays lame music

jonesy: i wasnt going 2 go anyway.

slugzilla: yeah. stay home n watch a scray movie instead!

Coraline sighed and leaned her chin on her hand. Wybie was right, of course. And it wasn't like she really wanted to have to get all dressed up only to go be mocked and ridiculed by people she didn't really like or even know in a dark, hot, smelly gymnasium with watery punch and terrible music playing in the background. And yet, somehow, being denied the choice made her desperately want to go.

Not, of course, that she'd ever admit it.

jonesy: haha good plan. well i should try 2 do my homework

jonesy: gotta read 'the raven' for english 2morro

jonesy: :(

slugzilla: is that that long poem by that mopey guy?

jonesy: you could say that.

…

"So how was the dance?"

Tucker grimaced. "Let's just never talk about it again, and everything will be fine."

Coraline couldn't hide her smirk. "Did you get stood up?"

"I did not!"

"Yup, you got stood up." She shut her locker door with a bang. "Did you honestly expect Valerie to go with you? That's be – what's the phrase – total social suicide."

"I did not get stood up!" Tucker protested.

"Yeah, he went to the dance with me."

Coraline turned around to see Sam coming down the hall towards them, Danny a few steps behind her. When he saw Coraline, his eyes darkened slightly and a scowl settled onto his face. What _was_ his problem?

"So you ended up going to the dance after all? I thought you didn't want to go," Coraline asked, and Sam blushed, just a little, and rolled her eyes to cover it up.

"Well, I couldn't just let Tucker go alone." She turned to Tucker with a smirk. "Not after Valerie stood him up like that."

"How many times do I have to tell you that I did not get stood up?"

"So did you guys have fun?" Coraline asked. "How was it?"

Sam, Danny, and Tucker exchanged a look, and all answered at the same time.

"Boring."

"Pretty uneventful, actually."

"Eh, nothing special."

Coraline couldn't help but smile. It was nice of them to try to keep her from feeling quite so left out, even if they were all terrible liars.

"Well, this weekend, we're watching movies at my place instead," Sam said quickly. "I've got the complete collection of Nightmerica flicks on DVD. We could order pizza and hang out."

"Wait. You have all thirteen of them?" Tucker asked, sounding dumbfounded.

Sam beamed proudly. "_And_ Nightmerica vs. Femalien. Although that one isn't very good."

"Yeah, I thought the characters were really weak," Coraline agreed. "They were like cardboard cut-outs."

Sam looked at her for a moment, as though she were looking at a rare and sort of disgusting beetle. "With about as much blood in them. That's all I ask for in a horror movie character, the ability to splatter convincingly across the screen, and they seriously skimped on the splatter. And they put Femalien in a _mask_." She pulled a face.

Coraline shook her head in commiseration at the stupidity of the mainstream movie industry. "If they'd only paid attention to their own movie."

"Yeah. I'm still excited for the Trio of Doom flick coming out in a couple of months, though."

Coraline couldn't help but gasp, just a little, with glee. "Me too! My friend Wybie made me watch the first three Nightmerica movies, and we were going to go see that one together." She frowned. "But I guess I'm not driving all the way back to Oregon to watch a movie."

"Hey, I'll take you," Tucker offered. "You, me, a darkened theatre...and you can snuggle up to me if you get too scared."

"More like he can hide his face in your shoulder and scream like a baby when _he_ gets too scared," Sam interjected drily, and Tucker glared.

"Hey, for your information, I do not scream like a baby."

Sam sounded like she was trying not to laugh. "Yeah, I'm sure Coraline's going to be impressed by your very manly high-pitched squeals of terror."

"My squeals of terror are not high-pitched!"

"Sure, Tucker." Sam raised an eyebrow. "Anyway, I thought we were all going to see the movie together? And Coraline, you're welcome to come if you want."

"Really?" Coraline knew she probably sounded like an idiot, after just having had a whole conversation about this, but she hadn't expected to be seriously invited.

Sam just shrugged. "Sure, why not? If you guys are in," she added, turning towards the boys.

"Absolutely!" Tucker answered quickly, and then, "Iiif I don't already have a date that night. I mean, I'm kind of a hot property." Something beeped, and he pulled his PDA from one of the many pockets that adorned his pants.

Danny shrugged. "Yeah, that sounds like fun." The look he gave Coraline, however, suggested otherwise.

"You know, I'm gonna hold you to that," Sam warned him. "No weaselling out on me."

"Who, me? Weasel out on you? Sam, I'm hurt."

Sam scoffed. Coraline was amazed – she'd thought people only did that in books. However, like her sneer, it seemed to be part of Sam's Goth arsenal of disdain. "Oh, please. Like you've never blown me off to have an all-night Doomed marathon with Tuck."

Danny smiled weakly, trying hard to look totally innocent and failing miserably. Tucker looked up from his ever-present PDA for just long enough to ask, "Did someone mention my name?"

"It's not important," Sam answered. "Just trying to make you two feel guilty about playing computer games when we were all supposed to be hanging out."

"That was all?" Tucker shook his head. "You're right, it wasn't important."


	8. Chapter 8

Sam's house was _huge_.

Coraline stood outside, staring up dumbfounded, for nearly a minute before she rang the bell, trying to decide if maybe it was actually a duplex or divided up into apartments, like the Pink Palace had been. But it looked much too new for that. Finally, she decided that the only way she was ever going to find out was to go in, and marched up the steps.

She hesitated a moment longer before ringing the bell, wondering if this was really such a great idea. But then, why would they have invited her if they didn't really want her there?

She pushed thoughts of _Carrie_ out of her mind and leaned on the bell. It jangled cheerfully, and only seconds later the door swung open. Sam poked her head around the door, smiled, and said, "Oh, hi, Coraline. Come on in!"

"You didn't really want to invite me, did you?" Coraline asked, knowing what the answer would be.

Sam's smile stretched a little wider, starting to look a little more like a grimace, and she said through clenched teeth, "Why would you think that?" When Coraline didn't look impressed in the slightest, though, she dropped the grimace with a sigh. "It's that obvious, huh?"

"Kind of," Coraline admitted. "I mean, usually if you actually want to hang out with someone, you don't come up with every excuse in the book not to hang out with them. I mean, really. Gorilla watching?"

Sam looked quickly left, then right, as if searching for a way out. "You know, we actually were watching the purpleback gorilla. It was Danny's make-up project for biology, and -" She noticed the glare Coraline was giving her, and sighed heavily. "Look, it's not that we don't like you," she began, but Coraline cut her off.

"I have ears, you know." She crossed her arms deliberately. "And it's not like I can't hear what people are saying about me. I know I'm at the bottom of the heap here. And if you guys don't want to get brought down by association -" She stopped, because Sam looked like she was choking on something. "Are you okay?"

"Who, me?" Sam gasped. "Fine. Fine. I'm fine." And before Coraline could say anything more, she burst out laughing. "Seriously? You're worried about people thinking we're uncool because we hang out with _you_?"

"Um…yes?" Coraline wasn't quite sure what was happening, but she suspected that whatever the joke was, it was at her expense. "Look, I'm not _stupid_, I know the jocks and cheerleaders are running this grade and they've decided they don't like me for some reason and – look, this is really _not that funny_!" She was aware that she was probably getting a little too upset about something that, in the long run, didn't really matter, but Sam was nearly crying with laughter and it was really starting to get under Coraline's skin. It didn't seem like Sam was taking her seriously at all.

"Sorry," Sam finally managed, once she'd finished her laughing spell. "Just…wow, you really haven't been here long. I keep forgetting."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Coraline asked, genuinely confused and just a little ticked off.

"Just that you chose to hang out with the three people who have the least reason to worry about their social standing being affected by being around _you_." Sam smirked. "Not that I particularly care, but…we're about one step up from band geeks and the kids who play tabletop roleplaying games at lunch. You don't have to worry about dragging us down from our lofty position as the social royalty of Casper High."

Coraline opened her mouth to say something, then realised she didn't have anything to say besides, possibly, a string of unintelligible questions, and shut her mouth again.

"Hey, you could have picked worse friends than the Goth girl, the techno-geek, and the kid whose parents hunt ghosts," Sam offered. "You could be hanging out with _Paulina_ right now." She made a face, and then sighed. "Like Danny's doing."

"No, I wouldn't, she – wait, _what_?" Coraline's brain caught up with her ears, and she had to quickly backpedal. "He's _what_?"

Sam just nodded.

Coraline was aware that she probably looked completely silly making exaggerated hand gestures to illustrate her confusion, but she didn't stop. "_Danny_? And _Paulina_? And – and – _what_? _How?_"

"What, you didn't know? He blew us off to go to Dash's party." Sam scoffed disdainfully. "He's only been bragging about it for pretty much the whole week."

Coraline picked her jaw up from where it had fallen, and put it carefully back into place. "Actually, no. He didn't say anything to me." She bit her bottom lip, frowning angrily. "Not that he ever does."

Sam pulled the door open a little wider, stepping out of the way as she did so. "You should come in."

…

"And this," Sam announced, swinging the door open with a theatrical flourish, "is my room." She stood by the door, beaming, as Coraline stepped inside.

"Wow," Coraline said, looking around. "I did not know this much velvet existed in the world." She spun slowly around in a circle, taking everything in. "Or this much purple paint. How cool are your parents, that they let you do all this?"

Sam smirked proudly. "They didn't."

Coraline turned to look at her. "Wait, they didn't let you -"

"Nope." Sam shook her head. "Actually, they hired an interior decorator to 'fix' it a while ago. I came home and there were _floral prints_ everywhere." She said the words _floral prints_ as if they tasted bad.

"I'm guessing that the makeover didn't last very long," Coraline surmised, as she wandered over towards the bed.

"Nah, I had it right back to normal by that night." Sam smiled lovingly at the dark-purple walls, illuminated only by flickering candlelight. "Besides, they have the entire house to decorate however they want to. This room is _mine_."

"Yeah, I really -" Something caught Coraline's eye, and she stopped mid-sentence, paralyzed completely. _Oh, not here, not now…_

"What is _that_?" she asked Sam carefully, trying hard to sound casual as she pointed to the offending item.

Sam looked over to see what Coraline was talking about. "Oh, yeah! Isn't she so creepy?" she asked lovingly, picking up the tiny ragdoll version of herself. Coraline recoiled as Sam held the thing out in front of her, before collecting herself and giving it an angry glare. The doll's black button eyes stared back expressionlessly.

"Creepy is definitely the right way to describe _that_," Coraline agreed, scrutinizing the doll. It was even wearing tiny black felt combat boots. "Where did you get it?"

Sam, thankfully, removed the thing from Coraline's face. "Siouxsie was in a box of my grandma's old things. Pretty weird how much she looks like me, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Coraline echoed dully. "Weird." _Listen, this is going to sound totally crazy, but you haven't noticed any funny doors that lead to nowhere or oddly musical mice appearing in the middle of the night lately, have you?_ She shook herself mentally. Sam would never believe her, and would probably think she was off her head. But she had to do something, or –

She was torn out of her thoughts by the sound of the doorbell. Sam tossed the doll back onto her bed. "That's either pizza or Tucker. You coming?"

Coraline gave the doll one last uneasy glance. It stared passively back at her, and she couldn't keep a small shiver from running down her back.

…

"Tucker, if you want to watch a scene over and over again, you could at least say something."

Coraline yawned. The chop-socky action movie they'd finally settled on had been entertaining for the first few minutes, but after nearly an hour it was starting to get tiring. Unoccupied, her thoughts drifted back to the doll, upstairs, sitting as innocuously as a ticking time bomb in Sam's room. She had to admit, Sam seemed like the perfect target for _her_ attentions. Rich parents who just didn't understand her or bother to try, strongly curious and with a well-developed sense of adventure, slightly twisted sensibilities that would just _love_ something as horrifyingly morbid as stitching buttons to her eyes...

But what didn't make sense was why here, and why now. Coraline was sure it wasn't a coincidence that, just as she moved into a new town, one of her new friends (if that was even the word) was targeted. And she knew that there was no way to tell anyone without sounding truly crazy. She was on her own, without even the cat to back her up, and something told Coraline that that was exactly how _she_ had planned it.

Coraline smiled inwardly as she came to a decision. So _she_ wanted to play games, then? Fine. Then Coraline would play _her_ game. But _she_ had better be prepared to lose.

"Do rich people's remotes usually do that?"

...

Coraline's mother looked up from her laptop as her daughter walked past the living room. "Hey, you're home early."

Coraline paused with her foot on the first stair. "The sleepover was called on account of ghost."

Her mother smirked. "Really, now. You went over there to watch scary movies and now you're home early because everyone's scared of a ghost? Next time, maybe you should stick to romantic comedies."

As soon as her mother turned back to her laptop screen, Coraline stuck her tongue out at her and continued on up the stairs.


	9. Chapter 9

"She's really not that bad, once you get to know her a bit."

"I don't know, I just can't seem to shake the feeling that she'd hiding something. That she's not what she says she is."

"What, a teenage girl?" The scorn was almost audible in Sam's voice.

"She just doesn't _feel_ right."

An exasperated sigh. "So you're seriously basing your entire opinion of someone on a static shock they gave you in the middle of history class?"

"_No_. And it wasn't a static shock! It was…something else."

"What, so you think she's a -"

"I don't know." Danny sounded frustrated, like he was trying to say something but wasn't sure what the words he wanted were. "She doesn't set off my ghost sense or anything, but there's something just not normal about her."

Coraline frowned. Ghost sense? What did _that_ mean?

She knew she shouldn't be eavesdropping, that it wouldn't exactly help her case that she was trustworthy and totally normal, really, but she just seemed to keep stumbling onto conversations that concerned her. And what normal person didn't want to know what other people _really_ thought of them?

Anyway, it actually wasn't her fault this time. She'd just been coming out of the classroom and heard Sam's voice, but had stopped when she'd realised her friend was talking to Danny. Coraline had not guessed wrong about what Danny thought of her, and had thought it might be a good idea to keep her distance.

She didn't understand it. She'd thought they'd been getting along fairly well – well, at least as well as she and Wybie did (although since that was a relationship built on mutual insults, convenience, and trial by fire, perhaps it wasn't the best comparison). But whatever had happened in history class had broken that, and Coraline didn't understand why.

She didn't understand _what_ had happened, either, but what with _her_ here in town and a poltergeist living in – well, _haunting_ Coraline's house, she wasn't surprised that weird things were happening around her. Maybe _she_ had tried to reach her again, and the stone had stopped _her_. Or maybe it had been something completely different. Coraline had no way of knowing, and while it bothered her a little that something had caused the stone to react like that and she had no idea what it was, she supposed that she'd have to wait until it happened again to find out why.

No, what she had to deal with right now was what was in front of her. And that meant seeing _her_ off again, and _that _meant gaining Sam's trust enough to convince her that Coraline really wasn't crazy when she started blathering about evil other mothers and buttons and doors. But she wasn't going to do that if one of Sam's best friends didn't trust Coraline at all. It had been hard enough getting Wybie to believe her, and he'd _seen_ the hand chasing her –

Coraline started down the hall toward her locker, the first glimmerings of an idea gathering in the back of her mind. If she gave them some kind of proof, something undeniable and real, they'd _have_ to believe her, wouldn't they? But what could she use as proof? All she had left of the adventure were her memories, Wybie's word, a snow globe without anything standing in the bottom, and a stone with a hole in it.

She swung open her locker door, still mulling it over, and grabbed her backpack.

...

Coraline was woken by the sound of something scraping across the floor.

She groaned and rolled over in bed to face her alarm clock, which said, in big, red letters, 1:12 AM. Coraline shut her eyes, and listened. The sound had stopped when she'd rolled over, but a few seconds after she shut her eyes, it started again, not very loud but insistent, as if something heavy were being pushed across her floor.

She cast around mentally for anything heavy in her room that might be pushed across the floor, and drew a blank. Other than the bookcase and the dresser, all she could think of were the boxes of books that –

She sat straight up in bed, and a stack of boxes taller than she was jolted to a stop at the foot of her bed, quivering slightly and looking innocent. Coraline couldn't suppress another groan.

"_Fine_. I _get_ it. You're scary. Ooo, so scary." She waggled her fingers, possibly for emphasis, possibly to enhance her sarcasm, even she wasn't sure. It was, after all, the middle of the night. "Now will you please _push off_ and let me go back to bed?"

The little man in the knit hat materialized at the foot of Coraline's bed. "I am the Box Ghost!" he announced proudly, and Coraline wondered why anyone would be so proud of something so _silly_. "And I have come to liberate these cardboard containers from your cruel enslavement!"

"Fine," Coraline snapped, and the little man puffed out his chest, drawing a deep breath as if preparing to shout something, and then deflated.

"Fine?"

"Yes. Fine. Take the boxes. Just leave the books on my shelves." Coraline waved vaguely at where she thought the bookshelves were. It was hard to tell, even in the faint bluish glow the little man seemed to generate. She wondered, for a moment, why she wasn't scared, but really, it wasn't surprising. She'd seen some truly scary things in her life, and a little man with a hang-up about cardboard boxes, even if he _was_ a ghost, didn't rate even a frightened gasp. "And if you wouldn't mind being a little quieter about it. It's the middle of the night, and _some_ of us are trying to sleep."

"I am the Box Ghost!" the little man tried again, waving his hands above his head, in case it got a reaction this time. The crates of books began to glow faintly bluish, and to slowly orbit around him.

Coraline blinked sleep out of her eyes. "Yes, we've been introduced. Look, if you want the boxes then take them, just leave the books here and let me sleep."

She couldn't quite tell, her eyes were still bleary, but it looked like the little man's bottom lip was quivering slightly. "You – you're _giving_ me boxes?"

"_Yes_." Coraline bit back a yawn.

The little man faded slowly from sight, but the room echoed with familiar ghostly laughter. Coraline groaned again, and rolled over, burying her head under her pillow as books whizzed around overhead. She'd have to do something about her poltergeist, and soon, before he got her in any more trouble. It was surely only a matter of time before –

"_Coraline Jones! It's one o'clock in the morning!"_

Coraline pulled her pillow down further over her ears.


	10. Chapter 10

_slugzilla:_ y wernt u on last nite

_jonesy:_ srry, ghost got me in trouble again.

_slugzilla:_ dude, u gotta do something about that ghost.

_jonesy:_ i know, but...what?

_slugzilla:_ wel...who u gonna call?

_jonesy:_ wybie, ghostbusters arent real.

_slugzilla:_ thats what you say.

_slugzilla:_ u no, the girl who battled n evil hand.

Coraline couldn't help but giggle. At least in the face of whatever problem she had, Wybie could always make her laugh. Even if it was usually by annoying her until she hit her breaking point.

But, she realised as she mulled it over, he did have a point. The world was full of strange and unusual things, things that most people would scoff at if you tried to tell them. But she'd _seen_ one of those things, she'd beaten it at its own game, and now...well, she had no right to be laughing at people who believed in ghosts. Especially since there was one haunting her bedroom.

And if there were people out there who believed in ghosts, maybe who had even fought them...then it wasn't that much of a leap to assume they'd still be fighting. That somewhere out there, there actually _were_ ghostbusters.

Coraline laughed again, but it sounded kind of weak to her. She was being silly. People who actually believed in the paranormal were considered crazy. She had no idea who to call, and it wasn't like she could just go up to people and ask, "Excuse me, I know this sounds weird, but do you hunt ghosts?"

There was an important thought there that she wasn't having, and she waited patiently for it to turn up. The room seemed oddly quiet, and she wondered if her parents had gone out somewhere, if they were making friends. Probably not, she decided. Her parents almost never went out, and they weren't exactly the social type. Not to mention that her mother had no desire to have anything to do with their neighbours, complaining that Mrs. Parker was a nosy old busybody who was trying to run her household for her and that the Fentons were just plain _weird_.

She paused, staring at the blinking message bar on her computer screen flash orange, then gray, as things began to line up in her head. _Weird,_ yes. Crazy? Maybe not so much.

"_You could have picked worse friends than the Goth girl, the techno-geek, and the kid whose parents hunt ghosts..."_

_slugzilla:_ jonesy? you there?

Coraline couldn't help the wide grin that snuck across her face as she typed a reply, not paying a huge amount of attention to what she was saying. If she played her cards right, she could get rid of her resident poltergeist, and convince her new friends that she wasn't crazy or a liar, in one fell swoop.

Now, all she needed was a plan.

...

Going up and knocking on the Fenton's door and asking if they really hunted ghosts was probably not the best idea. And yet, that was exactly what Coraline was doing.

She paused at the foot of the steps, wondering if this was really such a brilliant idea after all. So far, her poltergeist had only struck at night, and if this went wrong, she was going to look like a total, complete idiot. Not to mention she'd probably wind up branded "that crazy girl who believes in monsters" again...

Taking a deep breath, Coraline squared her shoulders, readjusted her exploring bag so it didn't slide off her shoulder, and, almost without realising she was doing it, reached up and grabbed the stone with a hole in it. Just rubbing her thumb over its smooth, hard surface made her feel a little calmer.

"Okay. Let's get this over with," she said aloud, to no one in particular. Before she could lose her nerve, she plastered her best ingratiating smile over her face, marched up the stairs, and rang the doorbell.

Or rather, tried to ring the doorbell. She wasn't expecting the doorbell to suddenly start glowing green, grow teeth, and snap at her finger, and barely pulled the appendage away in time. Unfortunately, the snarling (and the strangled half-scream she'd never admit to letting out) didn't seem to have been loud enough to alert anyone within the house to her presence. After a few minutes of waiting in awkward silence, Coraline reached for the bell again, thought better of it, and knocked on the door.

Coraline waited for a few more minutes, then pounded on the door as hard as she could. If nobody was home...

But she was rewarded by a shout of, "Is somebody gonna get that?" from somewhere inside the house. No answer was received, and Coraline heard footsteps from the other side of the door, before it swung open. The redheaded girl who opened the door stared at Coraline for a moment, and then raised an eyebrow. "I'm guessing you're here to see Danny."

"Actually -" Coraline began, but the girl cut her off.

"Well, it's good to see that he's socializing." She stepped out of the doorway. "He's up in his room with Tucker."

Coraline opened her mouth to explain that Danny wasn't expecting her, but the girl was already walking back into the house, her nose buried in a large book. Coraline was left alone on the doorstep, with the door wide open before her.

She only hesitated a few seconds, debating with herself, before she hurried inside, half-afraid that someone would see her and demand to know what she was doing there.

Coraline wasn't sure exactly where upstairs Danny's room was, or even where 'upstairs' was, but after a bit of nosing around she quickly found herself outside of what had to be his door. She arrived just in time to hear Tucker's raised voice from the other side of the door. "Not everything is about you, dude!"

"Whatever." Danny sounded frustrated, angry even. Suddenly Coraline wasn't so sure that this was the best time for her plan. She squashed that squiggle of doubt, though. She was here now.

She raised a hand to knock, but before she could move, the door swung open and she found herself face-to-face with a very startled-looking Danny. She caught a glimpse of blue walls and a model rocket hanging from the ceiling before Danny slammed the door behind him, a frown of deep suspicion forming on his face. "What are you doing in _my house_?"

Coraline tried on her best sheepish grin. "What, can't I come over and say hi to a friend who just happens to be my neighbour?"

"Nice try." Danny shifted slightly, and Coraline noticed that he looked prepared to run. Or fight, she realised a half second later. She wondered if he knew any martial arts. "And that totally explains why you're standing outside my door listening in on me and Tucker."

"I wasn't listening in," Coraline argued, even though she had a strong feeling it wouldn't do any good. "I was going to knock, but you opened the door on me."

"Yeah, right." Danny was still eyeing her like he'd caught her with her hand in the cookie jar, but at least he hadn't outright thrown her out yet. Coraline decided to take that as a good sign.

"Look, I know you don't really like me," she started. "But just hear me out, okay? I don't know what I did, but whatever it is, I'm sorry. And it's really awkward trying to hang out with your friends when you hate my guts, so...truce?"

"Wait, you want a truce so that you can hang out with _my _friends?"

"That came out wrong." Coraline shifted nervously. This wasn't going quite as well as she'd hoped, though it _was_ going about as well as she'd expected. "I meant - oh, forget it. This was a stupid idea. I'll just go home and we can go on awkwardly trying to avoid each other in a school with five hundred students. And pretending we don't notice each other when we're both talking to Sam and Tucker. Up to you."

Danny folded his arms across his chest, but he relaxed slightly. "Fine. Truce. But this doesn't mean we're friends."

"Got it." Coraline couldn't help a small grin. It wasn't perfect, but this was already way easier than convincing Wybie that she wasn't crazy had been. "Shake on it?"

Danny looked at her hand as though it were a live wire. "Thanks, but I'll pass."

"Wha -" And then it clicked. "Wait, you think I shocked you in history class on purpose?"

"I don't know," Danny admitted, grudgingly, "but I'm not gonna risk it."

"Look, I don't know what happened any more than you -" Coraline stopped. "No, wait, that's not true." She reached up and carefully unclasped her necklace, dropping the stone with a hole in it into her open palm. "Here, give this a poke."

"And get zapped again?" Danny shook his head. "What _is_ that, anyway?"

"It's a stone with a hole in it." Coraline dangled it from its chain, then playfully held it up to her eye. "It's good for...bad...things..."

"What?" Danny asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Nothing," Coraline answered, a little too quickly, pulling the stone away from her eye and blinking. She couldn't have seen that, could she? A second look just confirmed it, though. Seen through the hole in the stone, Danny was outlined with a faint greenish glow.

Just like the ghost in her bedroom.

Her plan was suddenly the last thing on her mind. Without thinking, she blurted out the first thing that came into her head. "You're a ghost?"


	11. Chapter 11

"You're a ghost?"

Danny turned so white that Coraline felt the obvious comparison would be too cliche. "W-what? That's – that's totally ridiculous." He forced a laugh, but it came out sounding weak and slightly scared.

"You _are_, aren't you?" Coraline continued, growing more convinced with every passing second. Things were starting to slot into place. "That's why my stone shocked you, and that's why you're so weird around me, and that's why you have a ghost sense – not that I know what that _is _– and -"

"_Tucker!"_

Danny's door opened a crack, and Tucker looked around it. "Okay, I don't want to keep fighting with you over – Coraline!" Suddenly, he was all smiles, although Coraline noticed that his grin looked a little strained. "Uh, how long have you been standing there?"

"What did you tell her, Tucker?" Danny demanded.

"What? I didn't tell her anything!"

"Then why does she know all this stuff? And don't pretend you weren't listening."

"Um," Coraline said, but the boys didn't seem to hear her.

"I told you, I didn't tell her anything! Believe it or not, I don't spend all my free time talking to cute girls about _you_."

"Um," Coraline repeated, feeling a blush starting to creep its way up her neck.

"Tucker, we talked about this -"

"No, dude, _you_ talked about this. You already ruined my shot at Valerie with that stupid overshadowing stunt -"

"_Not now!_ And Sam really wanted to go -"

"So why couldn't _you_ have taken her?"

"Um," Coraline tried again, a little more decisively. Both boys ignored her.

"Tucker, you know I had a date with Paulina!"

"And _I_ had a date with _Valerie_. But you didn't care about that, did you? You just _used_ me -"

"Hel-_lo_? I'm still here!" Thankfully, this time Coraline actually got their attention. "So…wait, you actually _are_ a ghost?"

There was a moment of absolute silence, then Tucker muttered, "Dude, you are so lucky your parents aren't home."

Danny gave Tucker the best dirty look Coraline had ever seen. "Why would you think I'm a ghost?" he asked Coraline, with a laugh that sounded much more natural than the first one, but Coraline still wasn't buying it. "I mean, that's not possible."

Coraline rolled her eyes. "You two just all but told me I'm right, so don't try and pretend I'm not."

Danny scowled, and Tucker put on a look of wounded innocence. "Hey, don't look at _me_."

"So. Ghost?"

Danny winced. "No. Not really." Coraline barely heard the mumbled sentence that came afterwards. "I'm only half."

"Half? How can you be half a ghost?"

Danny shrugged. "My parents are the scientists, not me. All I know is that I got zapped by their portal and now I'm telling all my secrets to somebody I barely know and definitely don't trust."

Coraline was bursting with questions, but after that last pointed remark she figured it might be a good idea to keep them to herself. So she satisfied her curiosity on only one count. "Portal?"

"Ghost portal. It was supposed to be a door into the ghost dimension. And unfortunately for me, it actually worked." The look on his face said clearly that he wasn't going to be answering any more questions. "How did you find out, anyway?"

Coraline shrugged. "I pay attention. And you glow."

"What?"

Coraline held up the stone with a hole in it. "Things look a little different through this. Ghosts glow green. And so do you."

"Let me see that?" Tucker reached over and took the stone from Coraline, holding it up to his eye like a monocle. "Whoa dude, she's right. You look like the Toxic Avenger or something." He gazed around the hall, before turning back to Coraline. "Where'd you get this?"

"It was a gift. From the old ladies who lived downstairs in my old apartment."

"So why were you looking at ghosts with it?" Danny asked.

"There's one in my house. And he keeps waking me up in the middle of the night and getting me in trouble."

"Gee, I have _no_ idea what that feels like," Danny grumbled. Coraline decided that this probably wasn't the best time to ask.

"Anyway, it's getting really annoying and I _was_ gonna come ask your parents if they'd take care of it for me." She left out the part where she'd been hoping they'd actually catch her resident specter, and then she'd have solid (well, semi-solid) proof that strange and otherworldly things did exist. Given that she'd just accused Danny of being a ghost and turned out to be at least half-right, she suddenly didn't think that convincing him and his friends that monsters existed would be too much of a stretch.

"Wait. You have a ghost in your house?"

"Yeah. He keeps getting into all my stuff that's still packed up and trying to steal the boxes."

Coraline wasn't sure what was so funny.

"You're being haunted by the _Box Ghost_?" Tucker managed between gasps.

"Yeah, that's what he -" Coraline paused. "Wait, you guys know him?"

"Not so much 'know' as 'throw back into the Ghost Zone at least once a day'," Danny answered, "but yeah."

" 'Throw back into the Ghost Zone?' "

"Yeah, we catch the ghosts that come out of the portal and put them back," Tucker volunteered.

"_Tucker!_"

"What? She's interested, and she might as well know everything."

"Okay, so have I got this right?" Coraline asked, feeling like her head was spinning. "So _you_ are half a ghost, because of an accident with your parents' portal, and now it lets ghosts out into town all the time, so you guys go around catching them again?"

Danny sounded both exasperated and exhausted when he said, "Close enough."

"And nobody else knows about this?"

"Well, Sam does, but she's the only one."

Now that Tucker'd mentioned it, Sam's absence was glaringly obvious. Coraline hoped that the sudden sinking feeling in her stomach didn't show in her voice when she asked, "Where is Sam, anyway?"

Tucker shrugged."She had some goth thing she wanted to go to. And we're playing Doomed. Sam isn't into that kind of stuff."

Coraline exhaled.

She was about to ask another question, but just as she opened her mouth, the redheaded girl she assumed was Danny's sister called up the stairs. "Danny? Are you guys all right up there?"

"Fine, Jazz!" Danny shouted back, and Coraline turned around to see the redhead, standing at the foot of the stairs, cross her arms and frown.

"I heard you shouting something about ghosts. I hope Mom and Dad's unhealthy obsessions isn't interfering with your socialization -"

"Jazz!"

"We're just trying to figure out how to beat the haunted tiki room level," Tucker interjected innocently. "The ghost guardians keep kicking us back a level."

The redhead – Jazz – raised an eyebrow, but didn't argue. "Well, could you do it a little more quietly? I'm trying to read, and if Mom and Dad come home and hear you shouting about ghosts they'll barge in shooting first and maybe ask questions later."

"Sure," Danny sighed. "Come on, guys, let's go to my room."


	12. Chapter 12

Coraline hadn't been in many average teenage boys' bedrooms, but if she'd had to imagine one, this would be it. She didn't recognise the bands in most of the posters that dotted the walls (although she thought her friend Lydia had mentioned liking Morbid Antisocial Youth), but the NASA posters were easier to place. Three model rockets, painstakingly painted, dangled from the ceiling, and a laptop sat open on the (surprisingly, neatly made) bed, displaying a digital landscape. Coraline guessed she really had interrupted a game.

Danny sat down at the desk, where another computer was set up. "How did you end up looking for ghosts, anyway? Most people in this town wouldn't believe in ghosts if one dragged them through a wall."

"I'm not going to tell anybody, if that's what you're worried about," Coraline said quickly. "It was bad enough being the weird kid who believes in monsters in Ashland, I don't want to repeat it here."

"What kind of -" Danny was abruptly cut off by the shrill ring of a telephone.

"Are you gonna get that?" Tucker asked, and Danny shook his head.

"Jazz thinks she's a responsible adult. Let _her_ deal with the adult responsibilities." He grinned, and turned back to Coraline. "So what did you –"

"_Danny!_" Jazz' voice really carried, Coraline noticed. "It's for you!"

Danny sighed exaggeratedly, before picking up the phone on the desk beside him. "Hello? What? No, Mrs. Manson, she isn't here," he said into the phone, rolling his eyes. He listened for a moment, then turned to Tucker with a puzzled look on his face. "Grounded? She said she was going to this goth poetry slam -" A pause. "Well, if that's _why_ you grounded her, then that's probably where she is."

"Sam?" Tucker asked, and Danny nodded. Coraline's mouth suddenly felt painfully dry.

"Yeah, I'll let you know if we hear anything from her." Danny hung up the phone and turned to Tucker. "Her mom thinks Sam snuck out. So of course she just assumes it's my fault. Why do her parents always blame this stuff on me?" Seeing the smirk on his best friend's face, he added, "And why don't they ever blame _you_?"

"I don't know, dude. Maybe because I'm not a juvenile delinquent? You do kinda have a record."

"Does Sam sneak out a lot?"Coraline asked, and Danny and Tucker both laughed.

"She practically has an elevator from her bedroom window to her backyard," Tucker answered. "And with that kind of cash, she could probably buy one if she felt like it."

"Her parents are always trying to keep her from doing stuff with us, or anything they think is a 'bad influence'. It's never stopped her." Danny smiled, and Coraline noticed that it looked a little more wistful than usual. "She's probably at the Skulk and Lurk right now."

"Are you sure, though?" Coraline persisted, feeling kind of stupid. These guys had known Sam since forever. They ought to know what she was like. If they said she'd snuck out, she'd probably snuck out. But Coraline couldn't help but remember how she'd waited for her parents to come home until she could barely keep her eyes open, making excuses for where they were until she couldn't deny it anymore. And this time, she wasn't taking any chances.

"No, I'm not sure," Danny answered, giving Coraline a look that felt uncomfortably like the one she'd gotten from Wybie when he'd decided she'd gone completely off her nut. "Why?"

"Does she have a cell phone, or something we could get ahold of her with?"

"Yeah, but if she snuck out she'll have it turned off, so her parents can't call." Now Tucker was starting to look worried. "What, did she tell you something?"

"Not exactly," Coraline mumbled, feeling nothing short of miserable.

"Then what – is Sam in trouble?"

"Maybe." Coraline sighed. And suddenly, it all came tumbling out. "I don't know for sure, but... You know I said the stone with a hole in it was a gift? Well, they gave it to me because the tea leaves said I was in danger, but I beat the other mother back in Ashland and I thought it was over, but then I found her doll in Sam's room, but I didn't know for sure and I didn't think anybody would believe me -"

"Whoa, what?" Danny held up both hands in the universal gesture for 'slow down'. "Try starting from the beginning."

Coraline took a deep breath, and forced herself to talk a little more slowly. "Back in our apartment in Ashland, I found this little door in the wall that went to this...other world. Like real life, only everything was so much better. But it was all a trap, and I had to beat my – the other mother to get away and get my real parents back. I didn't kill her, though, and now I think she's back and she's going after Sam. She spies on people with these dolls that look like them -"

"Sam does?"

"No! The other mother. But there was a doll like that in Sam's room when we went over to watch movies, and...well, I don't think the other mother's forgotten that I beat her. And she loves games. And she's a sore loser." Coraline stared forward defiantly, challenging them to laugh. "I know it's a crazy story -"

"She says to the half-ghost kid," Tucker deadpanned.

"Then Sam _is_ in trouble." Danny got to his feet, and a ring of brilliant white light appeared around his waist, splitting into two and sweeping over him. Once Coraline managed to blink away the afterimages, Danny had changed.

"I'll go check out the Skulk and Lurk. You two stay here in case she comes by." The echo in his voice, along with the faint glow that outlined him, made more of a difference than the hair and the eyes or even the jumpsuit, Coraline decided. She wasn't sure that, if she'd seen him on the street, she'd have recognised him as Danny. There was something fundamentally unremarkable about Danny Fenton, and there was nothing unremarkable at _all_ about the ghost in front of her.

"Why do _we_ have to stay here?" Tucker complained. "It's _your_ house."

"Yeah, but can _you_ fly at a hundred and fourteen miles an hour?"

Tucker crossed his arms. "Fine. Just get back fast. I don't know how long I can cover for you if your sister starts asking questions."

"Gotcha." And without any warning, Danny shot straight up into the air and _through_ the ceiling.

Coraline realised her mouth was hanging open, and carefully shut it.

Tucker finally looked over at her. "Hey, you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Something like that," Coraline answered, with what was probably a very weak smile. It was one thing to have somebody tell you they were half-ghost, and another thing to see it for yourself.

"But seriously. You're not too freaked, are you?"

"He says to the girl who fights monsters," Coraline retorted, earning a smile from Tucker. And then, before she really had time to think about it and make herself too nervous, she asked, "Do you really think I'm cute?"

Tucker looked like he'd just been caught with his hands in the cookie jar. "What?"

"You said you didn't spend time talking to cute girls about Danny. You...weren't talking about me, were you." Coraline was sure she was blushing.

"No! I mean yes! I mean – wait, you _want_ me to think you're cute?" By the way his eyes widened, Coraline could tell it wasn't intended as a jab at her.

Coraline was very glad there wasn't a mirror anywhere nearby, because she knew she had to be as red as her mother's least-favourite sweater. "No! Well, maybe." She couldn't explain why she was so flustered, but she was sure she didn't want to be. Why did boys have to make everything complicated? "Ugh, forget it."

"No way!" Tucker was grinning like a really good metaphor. "You want me to think that you're cute! So...d'you wanna go to a movie sometime?"

"Don't you think we have bigger things to worry about right now?"

"Well, it doesn't have to be a movie. We could grab a coffee."

"You drink coffee?"

"Oh, sure! I drink like five cups a day." Coraline raised an eyebrow, and Tucker deflated slightly. "Okay, not really. But the ladies like a sophisticated man."

"Uh, which ladies are these?"

Tucker straightened up. "You can laugh, but I've done my research. I pay attention to what girls like. So. You. Me. Movie?"

Coraline couldn't think of anything to say to that, so she settled for a kind of one-shoulder shrug. "Stranger things have happened. So…you and Valerie Grey?" she asked, hoping to change the subject. "I thought she stood you up for that dance."

Tucker glanced longingly over at his computer, as if wishing he could escape into the virtual world, and then suddenly spun back to Coraline with a megawatt smile. "Hey, I just had a _great_ idea. Do you play Doomed?"


	13. Chapter 13

"No, no, no, you have to go _along_ the bridge!"

"That doesn't make any sense! There's monster trucks barrelling down that bridge at speeds that will _kill_ me! Why can't I go under the bridge? It'd be so much less stupid."

Tucker let out a frustrated sigh. "That's just the way the game works. You have to outmaneuver the trucks or they kill you. That's how you get to the next level."

"Well, then, why can't I outmaneuver them by going _underneath_?"

"Am I interrupting something?"

Coraline and Tucker both spun around to face Danny, leaving Coraline's character to die for the fourth time. "No," they both said, in unison, and Coraline felt her face getting hot again.

"So was Sam at the poetry thing?" she asked quickly, hoping to shift the focus away from herself. Unfortunately, it worked a little too well.

"No, she wasn't. And she's not at the park, or the Nasty Burger, or anywhere else we hang out. Have you guys tried calling her?"

Tucker waved his cell phone in response. "Twice. And texted her about once a minute. Wherever she is, she's not answering."

"That's not good." Danny glanced around the room, as if the walls would suddenly explain everything. "Where did you find the door?"

"Huh?" Coraline asked stupidly, before realising the question was aimed at her. "It was in the spare room in our apartment. It was just little, and somebody'd papered over it."

"So it'd be hidden?"

"I guess so. It wasn't really hidden in my apartment, though. More like forgotten." She snapped her fingers. "And there'll be a key. But there's only one. The other mother can duplicate everything else, but she can't make a key to let somebody into her world. And you can't get in or out without a key."

"So we have to find the key?"

"Yeah." And then something horrible occurred to her. "If Sam didn't take it in with her."

"What happens if she did?" Tucker asked, slowly, as if he didn't really want an answer.

Coraline took a deep breath. "I don't know. But I hope we don't have to find out."

...

"Are you sure this is going to work?"

Danny rolled his eyes. "I can turn invisible and walk through walls. They're not going to catch me."

"Yeah, relax," Tucker laughed. "Nothing's going to go wrong."

"I wish you hadn't said that," Coraline muttered, quietly enough that neither of the boys could hear her. It wasn't like she was above a little rule-breaking, but sneaking into someone else's house, even when it was a matter of life or death, was a little farther than she'd usually go. And while it whiffed of fairy-tale logic, she was irrationally sure that saying "nothing's going to go wrong" was just an open invitation for things to go wrong.

She wasn't wrong. A few short seconds after Danny disappeared through Sam's closed window (Coraline wasn't sure she was going to get used to that), she took a step backwards and an unexpected garden gnome caught her foot, bringing her crashing down into a collection of ornamental flowerpots.

The light over the front door flicked on, and a very irritated-looking man with a hairdo that looked like it had been made out of yellow plastic and a blue and yellow argyle sweater-vest opened the door and stared disapprovingly down at them. "What is the meaning of - oh, it's _you_. Who's this? And where's that Fenton kid? Aren't you attached at the hip?"

Coraline couldn't really believe that Sam was in any way related to this guy. She disliked him on the spot, and the look he was giving her (and especially her hair) wasn't helping matters. Still, when you're sneaking around someone's house and wind up being caught by them with your knee in their begonias is not the time to start making enemies. So Coraline plastered on her best talking-to-adults smile and picked herself up, brushing off her jeans. "Nothing broke!"

Sam's father ignored her, turning to Tucker. "My daughter isn't with you, is she?"

"No, sir! Actually we were…just…coming to ask if you knew where she was," Tucker babbled, and Coraline couldn't help but be impressed that he'd managed to come up with a halfway-decent excuse on the spot.

Sam's father raised an eyebrow. "We both know that Samantha snuck out to spend time with you. If I go upstairs right now, will she be back in her bedroom?"

Coraline's brain ground to a squealing halt.

"Uh. She snuck out?" Tucker tried, with a huge, ingratiating smile. "Wow, that is the most surprising thing I've heard all night! Did you know that Sam snuck out?" he asked Coraline, who quickly shook her head.

"Nice try." Sam's father crossed his arms. "If you see her before I do, you can tell Samantha that she is grounded for a week."

"Yes, sir," Tucker nodded, and they both hurried out of the yard before any more questions could be asked.

" 'Nothing's going to go wrong', huh?"

"Oh, shut up," Tucker grumbled.

…

The wait at the end of the street was almost unbearable. Coraline, hugging her arms, wished she'd brought a jacket. "Is he ever coming out?" she grumbled, in an undertone.

"Hey," Danny's voice said, from somewhere near her ear, and Coraline shrieked and jumped out of the way before realising what was going on.

"Don't DO that!"

"Sorry," Danny said, fading back into visibility and not sounding very sorry at all.

"Did you find the door?" Tucker asked, and Danny shook his head.

"If it's in there, it's _really_ well-hidden." He turned back to Coraline, who did her best to look like she hadn't just jumped ten feet. "You wouldn't happen to know anything helpful that you just forgot about until now, do you?"

"I told you everything I know," Coraline answered, trying not to snap. "The other mother lures kids through a door into this other reality where everything's perfect. And you need the key to get in or out."

"So how do we get the key?"

"I don't know! And if the door's not -" She stopped, a memory shuffling embarrassedly to the forefront of her mind. "It's a game."

"What?"

"It's a game! She loves games, so I challenged her to a – I don't know, a scavenger hunt, with the key as a prize. And I won. So if this is a rematch…"

"Then the key is still the prize? Wait, but then how are you supposed to -"

"That's the game," Coraline interrupted Tucker, feeling more and more confident of her conclusion with every passing moment. "So we won't find the door in there. That'd make it too easy."

"Oh yeah. Way too easy." Danny shook his head disbelievingly. Coraline frowned.

"Hey, chill, dude. We've got this." Tucker grinned. "You are, after all, talking to the undisputed masters of gaming. Solving puzzles? Piece of cake."


	14. Chapter 14

"Piece of cake?"

"Shut up," Tucker grumbled. "How was I supposed to know karma can strike twice in the same place?"

"Tucker, I think you're confusing karma with lightning."

Coraline sighed, running a hand through her hair. Amity Park was a lot bigger than she'd thought it would be. "This is like looking for a needle in a haystack."

"Tell me about it. This is the fourth time we've ended up back at the park." By the note of accusation in his voice, Coraline guessed that Danny was right back to not trusting her. "If you have any more information, it'd be really helpful to know right about now."

"I already told you, I told you everything I know!" Coraline managed, through gritted teeth. She didn't want to shout, but she might have raised her voice. Just a teensy-tiny little bit. "If I knew something that could stop us running around in circles, I think I would have mentioned it the third time we wound up in the park!"

"The door was definitely in your house?"

"Yes," Coraline sighed, for what felt like the three thousandth time. "But I don't know if it has to be. The Beldam built a whole world, and the people in it. I think she can pretty much do whatever she wants."

"So what now?"

Coraline sat down heavily on the closest bench, glaring at an innocent shrub. "I don't know. If we even had just one clue..."

As excellent narrative timing would have it, it was then Danny shivered, breathing out a puff of blue mist. Coraline stared for a moment before deciding it was just one more little weirdness in a night of lots and lots of weirdness, and not really worth focusing on.

The shout of "BEWARE!" from the trees behind them helped make that decision a really easy one.

Danny relaxed visibly as the mysterious rings of lights flashed over him. Coraline wondered if she was going to get used to that, ever. The fact that Tucker didn't even bat an eyelash seemed to be a vote for yes, but she couldn't be sure.

"Great," Danny groaned, floating nonchalantly into the air as the trees rustled and an unfortunately very familiar blue face in a knit hat poked out of the cover of the leaves. "You are the last person I wanted to see tonight. Tucker, thermos?"

Tucker rummaged around in his backpack, pulling out something that looked like the love child of a soup container and a laser gun. "Catch!"

"No! Wait!" The Box Ghost held up both hands. "Do not seal me in your cylindrical container!"

Tucker tossed the thermos-looking thing up to Danny, who grabbed it out of the air easily. "You have five seconds to give me one good reason why I shouldn't." He unscrewed the cap, and Coraline heard a faint whine, like something charging. "One…"

"You cannot send me back to the Ghost Zone!" the Box Ghost shouted, backing into the trees, and Coraline felt a twinge of sympathy for him for the first time. He sounded genuinely scared.

"Oh yeah? Just watch me."

Coraline flashed back to Danny and Tucker laughing about having to toss him back once a day. If he were this scared of Danny, then why would he keep coming back? "Wait a second," she called out, just as Danny pressed a button on the side of the thermos.

The white light that flashed out of the mouth of the device made Coraline blink, and half a second later, the Box Ghost was gone and Danny was screwing the lid back onto the thermos, floating down back down to the bench with a smile on his face. "At least _this_ didn't take an hour. Come on, let's get back to the portal and drop this guy off."

...

If her parents knew what was in the basement of the house right next door to them, Coraline decided, they would never have moved in. This was, if possible, even weirder than the contraption on the roof. It looked like they'd converted the basement into a cross between a research lab and a nuclear power plant. The whole room was panelled in steel like some kind of underground bunker, and full of things her fingers just itched to poke, pick up, and play with. But the thing on the far wall really took the cake. A pair of giant, yellow-and-black striped blast doors set in an octagonal frame loomed over them, twice as tall as she was and (Coraline had to admit) far more intimidating. She didn't have to ask to know that this had to be the infamous ghost portal.

And just like that, she knew where the door was.

"I really wish I knew how he keeps getting out," Danny commented, walking over to the portal and uncapping the thermos.

"Hang on," Coraline interjected, reaching for Danny's arm without thinking. She had to admit, it was pretty funny to watch him jump backwards, trying to avoid her grip. "Oh, sorry. Is he usually that scared to go back?"

"I don't know, and I don't really care."

"No, she's got a point, dude. Usually he pops up shouting about how you can't defeat him, not hiding in bushes." Tucker stuck his hands in his pockets.

"It's the _Box Ghost_. Why are we even having this conversation?"

"Because we're looking for a door to another world." Coraline gestured to the portal. "And guess what we're standing right in front of?"

"Hate to break it to you, but this portal only goes to the Ghost Zone."

"Oh," Coraline said, after a moment, feeling rather stupid. "Well, what's in the Ghost Zone?"

"Ghosts," both Tucker and Danny answered, in unison.

"I figured." Coraline couldn't help but roll her eyes. "So what, do they just float around randomly? Or is there an actual world in there?"

The boys looked at each other, and Tucker shrugged. "You're the ghost kid."

Danny sighed. "I don't know. And, once again, I don't really care! This isn't getting us anywhere."

"Neither of you know what's on the other side of the portal." Coraline shook her head. "Well, why don't we ask somebody who _does_ know?"

"No way. I am _not_ letting the Box Ghost out again." Danny pulled the thermos away from her, unscrewing the cap as he did so. "You have no idea how much of a pain this guy is to catch every five minutes."

"Okay, then. Let's hear _your_ brilliant idea." Coraline crossed her arms and settled in to wait.

A few seconds later, Tucker pulled out his PDA and started to fiddle with it. "You guys mind if I time this standoff?"

"Tucker!"


	15. Chapter 15

Her bedroom wasn't quite identical. Sam was _sure_ she'd never had a copy of the _Bela Lugosi's Dead_ single on glow-in-the-dark vinyl, or a coffin-shaped bookcase, or a lamp that looked like a dragon's head mounted on the wall that glowed from the eyes and mouth and had Opinions on goth poetry (all of which were _wrong_, and Sam spent a happy forty-five minutes arguing with it until it gave in and saw the error of its ways).

She wasn't really sure how she'd ended up in this alternate world where everyone wore all black all the time, but she wasn't really complaining. (Although seeing _Paulina_ in a corset, platform boots, and sugar-skull makeup had made her question her sanity for a minute or two. Weird, she could deal with, but that was just _too_ weird.) Actually, it was getting a little grating. Sure, feeling like she'd just walked into a Tim Burton movie was nice at first, but that wore off quickly, replaced by a nagging feeling that something wasn't right.

Once she'd talked the lamp around, there was no one else who would argue with her, or even disagree with her. They just ate up everything she said like it was the gospel truth. It had been kind of fun having a captive audience for a little bit, small as it was, but then it started to get boring and a little creepy. It was like they were all still just blindly conforming, only to _her _version of cool. And here, being goth or ultra-recyclo-vegetarian wasn't a statement. It wasn't a way to set herself apart from the crowd, it was the same thing the crowd was doing. Here, she wasn't unique, she was _ordinary_. She hated to admit it, but she was even kind of starting to miss battling her mother over clothes.

No, Sam decided, watching the doorknob rattle against the chair (carved to look like a skeleton) that she'd shoved underneath it to keep the other parents out. There was no way she was staying here. Even if button eyes _did_ look pretty cool.

Now, if only she could figure out how to get home again.

Luckily, this room had an escape ladder under the window too.

…

Two minutes and forty-three seconds later, Coraline was staring past a windshield at a vast, seemingly endless view of…green swirls. It was a little like when the Other Mother's world had started to collapse; it didn't make much sense to look at, being nothing more than featureless space. The occasional chunk of floating rock (or, at least, Coraline thought it was rock, although she was fairly sure that rocks weren't supposed to be purple) were the only things that broke up the monotony.

"Are you sure this thing is safe?" Tucker asked, for the third time, and Danny rolled his eyes.

"No, I'm not. My parents built it, after all, and it's not even finished. But how else were we going to get around the Ghost Zone?" He yanked hard on the controls, and the ship veered to the right with a very dangerous-sounding _creak_. Coraline gripped her seat and hoped the oddly-named "Spectre Speeder" wouldn't fall apart before they got to…wherever they were going. For all any of them knew, they were being led directly into a trap. "So, what's the plan?"

It took Coraline a moment to realise that Danny was talking to her. "What?"

"The plan. For when we finally get to this Other Mother." He glanced over at her, before turning back to watch where they were going. Coraline didn't envy him the view; their guide's behind was a less than inspiring sight. She thought momentarily of the fit her parents were going to have when the Box Ghost showed up to collect his fee, but quickly shrugged it off. Her parents never noticed anything. "You do _have_ a plan, don't you?"

Coraline blinked. "I thought _you_ were the big damn hero. Why am _I_ supposed to have the plan?"

"You're the only one who knows what to expect when we get there."

Coraline had to admit that this was true. Then again, she didn't really know much more than the other two did. "Well, you're the one who knows Sam. What would her ideal world be like?"

"Black," Danny and Tucker chorused.

"Right. I knew that." Coraline crossed her legs, tapping one foot in the air as she tried to remember every detail that might help them out. "The Other Mother can create little worlds, and she's really good at detail, but she doesn't have much range. She mostly just focused on the apartment building when she went after me, and left the rest of the world blank. So, it'll probably just be Sam's house and maybe a couple other familiar places. And they'll all be the same. Only different."

"Okay, you lost me," Tucker admitted.

Coraline wracked her brains for something to compare it to. "You know how in nightmares, when you can recognise a place but it all looks different. But _good_ different. Kind of creepy, maybe, and since it's Sam probably _more_ creepy, but in an interesting way?" She could tell from the looks on their faces that she'd lost them. "Nevermind. It'll be like walking into Halloweentown. And the people -"

"Whoa, wait. People?"

"People. Not _really_ people. She kind of makes them out of whatever she has lying around." Coraline tried to stop the memory before it could weasel its way out of her subconscious, but she was too late. The Other Father's dying scream was already echoing around her skull. "They can be not so bad, but mostly they're under her control and do what she says. And they'll all have buttons for eyes."

"You know, if I didn't know better, I would think you were making this all up as you went along," Danny remarked. And then, "What the..."

"I think we're getting close," Tucker commented, as a flurry of purple doors flew past the windshield. Coraline leaned forward, mentally comparing each door to the one she remembered. There was an amazing variety, but no small, square ones came into view. It was getting harder and harder to keep track, though, as the number of doors only increased. Coraline saw one that looked like nothing so much as a drawbridge, a narrow door that could only have opened onto a broom closet, and even a refrigerator door. As they flew, the doors grew closer together and greater in number until she could barely see the green of the Ghost Zone between them. The Specter Speeder slowed almost to a crawl, bumping doors gently out of the way as it floated forward. Coraline leaned around and saw them drifting back into place behind the ship, like iron filings being pulled into place by a magnet.

And then, with a lurch, they came to a halt.

"Why'd we stop?" Coraline demanded. Both Tucker and Danny shrugged. Coraline stared out the windshield, looking for their blue-glowing guide. She found him quickly, hovering in place a little to the left of the Specter Speeder.

"I hate to be that guy, but…are we there yet?" Tucker asked, and Coraline shook her head slowly.

"I don't recognise any of these doors."

"This is as far as I can take you," the Box Ghost called out, shouting to be heard through the thick glass windshield of the speeder.

"What? But we're not even close!" Coraline jumped to her feet, not noticing the way the speeder rocked.

"Close enough," the Box Ghost said in a voice that was practically a whisper by Box Ghost standards. "The Box Ghost will not go any farther!" He made a slashing motion with both arms.

"Oh, you won't." Danny rolled his eyes. "What, scared you're gonna get turned into a door sandwich?"

The Box Ghost bristled. "The Box Ghost is not _scared_," he sneered.

"Right. Which is why you're running away," Tucker agreed.

"The Box Ghost does not run away!" The little man glanced nervously over his shoulder. "Except when being chased," he added, a little less emphatically, before returning to his usual tone of boisterous, irrepressible dramatics. "No ghost dares to trespass on _her_ lair."

"Lucky we're not ghosts, then." Coraline crossed her arms and fixed on her best determined face. "Just point us in the right direction."

The Box Ghost flung out an arm, one finger pointing straight forward towards a solid wall of doors. _"There_." Then, without warning, he turned and flew off in the opposite direction. A faint wail of "Beware!" floated after him.

"Thanks!" Coraline called. "So now how do we get through _that_?"

Danny shrugged. "I can't phase through anything here. Tried it, didn't work."

"So we have to break through it?"

Danny grinned. "Let's find out how fast this thing can go."

Tucker, who seemed to be used to this kind of thing, checked his seatbelt and grabbed onto his seat. Coraline was a little slower to catch on. "Wait, what are you -" The rest of the sentence dissolved into a scream as Danny pulled back on the steering and the Specter Speeder shot forward. Coraline flung up her arms in front of her face as the wall of doors sped towards her, and braced for the crash –

Which didn't come. Without warning, they were through the wall, floating inside a perfect sphere of purple doors.

"Did you do that?" Tucker asked Danny, who looked as baffled as Coraline felt.

"I don't think so…"

Coraline, who had only been half listening, stopped altogether. "Look!"

There, in the very centre of the sphere, floated a single, small, square door.


	16. Chapter 16

The key was in the lock.

"Because that doesn't have 'TRAP' written all over it in foot-high letters, or anything," Coraline sighed. "You'd think that getting beaten at her own game might teach her to be at least a little bit subtle."

"Which is why you're making me open it?" Danny grumbled.

"Oh, shush. You're the only one who can fly, so of course you're the one who's going to get stuck with opening the door. Now quit whining."

Tucker glanced over at Coraline. "Harsh."

"Yeah, I guess it was." Coraline sighed. "Sorry."

"No, you're right." Danny squared his shoulders, and dropped through the floor of the Specter Speeder. Coraline decided that she really wasn't ever going to get used to that. "But if something comes out and eats me, _you_ get to explain it to my parents," he called back, the thick windshield muffling his words as he floated over to the door.

The key turned, with a click that Coraline could hear even from inside the Specter Speeder, and the door swung open with a slow and ominous creaking noise. There was a faint rustling, and a few cobwebs blew out, tangling in Danny's unruly hair.

Coraline released a breath she hadn't noticed she was holding. "Well, I guess we're going in."

...

The streets of the pseudo-Amity Park were quiet and eerily empty. Sam was used to there being few people around, but usually there were at least signs of life (or death; when there were no people around in Amity Park, you could almost guarantee you'd run into a ghost). But the streets were too quiet, too still. No curtains twitched, no flickering blue glows came from television sets, no cars honked in the distance. Everything was as still as the grave.

Sam shivered and wished she'd brought a jacket. It was cold, here, and getting colder the farther she walked away from the house. In fact, she'd noticed white patches in people's front lawns. It was only when she saw that the greyish, overcast sky was starting to swallow the tops of buildings that she realised the white patches weren't snow. They were simply…nothing. Nothing had been put there, nothing was there. Blank canvas.

"Creepy," she muttered to herself, rubbing her bare arms. "And I don't mean that as a compliment," she added, just for the sake of clarification. She didn't think anyone was listening, but you could never be too sure. Not here, anyway.

Ahead of her, the street tapered off into featureless blankness. Sam looked around, but there was still no one else about. She walked up to the edge of the street, where the asphalt turned into simple flat black under her feet and the buildings thinned into two-dimensional impressionist cutouts like cardboard backdrops for a play, and looked out, a little floored by the sheer size of the blankness. It seemed to just go on and on, without bottom or top or end, or any sign of anything that wasn't blankness. She couldn't tell if there was a surface there that she could walk on, or if, should she walk off the flat black thing that used to be a road, she would just fall forever through unending nothingness.

"Okay," Sam admitted, "that's pretty dark." A poem about this place would probably get a round of deep, tormented sighs at the weekly Skulk and Lurk poetry reading, which was the closest that crowd came to a standing ovation. Still, it wasn't exactly her idea of a fun place to visit. She'd leave going into that weird blankness as the last resort.

There had to be some other way out.

…

There wasn't.

Every street Sam went down petered out and disappeared into a rough sketch of a street and then, eventually, into nothingness. It didn't take long to figure out that this world was only a few streets wide, with her house at the centre. In fact, everywhere she went, she could still see her house. Or the _other_ house, to be precise.

She was _not_ going back there. Just because the way in had been under the stairs didn't mean that it was the only way in or out. And she was going to find her way out, or –

There was someone standing at the end of the street.

Sam ducked hurriedly into an alley before the figure silhouetted against the mouth of the alley noticed her. She hadn't gotten a good look, but it was a pretty safe bet that whoever it was, they would be only too happy to report back to that woman who called herself Sam's other mother. And Sam didn't feel like getting caught now.

She heard footsteps from the street outside, and tried very hard to breathe quietly. Looking around for an escape route, any escape route, Sam spotted a door in the wall beside her, and reached out for the handle.

It didn't turn. And no matter how much she pulled, the door didn't budge. She looked closer, and realised that it wasn't really a door at all, but a piece of the wall, molded and painted to look like a door but incapable of opening. It must have been the easiest way to build a world that was mostly buildings: make the outsides, but with nothing on the inside and no way in.

The footsteps stopped at the mouth of the alley, and Sam flattened herself against the wall, hoping vainly that she wouldn't be seen. If whoever it was was looking for her, then that meant the other mother knew she was out, and was looking for her. And if the other mother was looking for her, then Sam really didn't want to be found. She wondered, fleetingly, if there were ghosts here. She hadn't seen any so far, but then again, this _was_ a near-perfect replica of a slightly spookier Amity Park.

And then a voice she knew almost as well as her own said, "Sam?"

"Danny?" Sam took a half-step away from the wall, and then hurried towards her friend. "Danny! What, did you guys -" And then she stopped.

Her best friend smiled at her, button eyes flashing. "Hey, Sam."


	17. Chapter 17

Coraline stepped through the door and fell.

There was no floor on the other side, something she hadn't been expecting. She simply stepped through the door and into empty space, her heart leaping into her throat even as her body dropped like a stone. Her strangled half-scream was cut off when she smacked into something hard and sharp that gave under her like a trampoline and twanged metallically before flinging her forwards. In the half a second before she smacked into the other side, she saw black lines striping the white blankness of the world she'd fallen into. They were familiar, but she couldn't quite place them.

And it wasn't until she'd bounced all the way to the bottom of the web and crash-landed heavily on Danny that she remembered.

"Oh no," Coraline said softly, once she'd got her breath back. "This is not good."

"Yeah," Danny agreed, muffledly. "Could you maybe, I don't know, get _off_ me?"

"Oh, sorry!" She scrambled a little way up the web, trying not to be shaken off when the thin strips of metal shook and quivered under her hands and feet.

Of course, that was when Tucker fell into her and knocked her back onto Danny.

"Ouch! Man, that is _sharp_," Tucker complained.

"What, not even a 'thanks for breaking my fall'?" Coraline elbowed him in the small of the back.

It took them all a few seconds to get untangled and off of each other, and the jangling on the web as they climbed up it, fell off, bounced off, and rattled around was almost deafening. And yet, there was still no sign of the Beldam. Something, Coraline thought, was very, very rotten.

"So where are we now?" Tucker asked, trying to check his pocket for his PDA without falling off of the web.

"Yeah. I thought this was supposed to be a replica of Amity Park or something." Danny looked up at Coraline, who was trying to see if there was anything else out there, beyond the web. The answer seemed to be no.

"I did too." Coraline bit her bottom lip, thinking hard. "This is the trap that the other mother set off when I won her game. It looks exactly the same as it did when I left."

"So we walked into a trap." Tucker's face split into a grin as his PDA started up with a _beep_. "Hands up if you didn't see that one coming."

"But if she's kidnapped Sam, she would have remade the world for her. That's what she did every other time. It doesn't make any sense!" Coraline thumped the web with one hand, and it shivered and shook, letting off a rattly screech. The noise quickly died down, and that was when she heard it.

A faint, slightly hollow metallic sound.

Like a pin dropping.

Coraline couldn't control the shiver that slithered up her spine.

It was followed by another soft, skittery click, and then another, and then a flurry, the sound of hundreds of needles clattering one against the other.

"What is _that_?" Tucker asked.

"Whatever it is, it can't be good," Danny said darkly, and Coraline nodded in agreement.

The web they were dangling from shook, once, nearly knocking Coraline off. And then it shook again, and Coraline, looking up, saw the reason why.

One long, spindly silver leg hooked itself over the top of the doorframe, leaving a long, deep scratch in the wood. It was quickly followed by another, and a third, and then something that looked like nothing so much as a gigantic spider made of needles and sewing scissors hauled its angular body up and over the doorframe. A skeletal neck extended, bringing a face that only retained a few shards of cracked porcelain over its sleek silver bones forward to peer at the three kids trapped in its web. Coraline was pleased to notice that only one silver-needle hand clicked and clattered greedily against itself; the other was missing.

The monstrous spider-thing that had been the other mother scuttled up over the door and down the web, her fractured face somehow managing to look both wickedly triumphant and _hungry_. She had replaced her black-button eyes, and something in the way they gleamed put Coraline in mind of a shark that had just scented blood. Their owner turned to survey Coraline, and she tried very hard not to think about what spiders did to bugs caught in their webs.

"Would you look at that," the Beldam said, and her voice was like the rattle of an old-fashioned treadle sewing machine (Wybie's grandmother had one, and had spent one rainy afternoon trying to teach Coraline to use it) that was badly in need of oiling. "The ungrateful brat comes crawling -" she skittered down the web at Coraline, stopping an inch from her face – "back to her mother."

Coraline leaned away from the needle-sharp finger that prodded her under her chin, raising her head. A growing green glow from her left made the Beldam whirl, only to be slapped in the face with a blast of green light, knocking her into her own web with a shriek of metal on metal.

Coraline turned, to see Danny staring at his hands, which were smoking faintly in that same shade of toxic, glowing green. "Okay, that's new."

"That is _seriously_ cool," Tucker said approvingly, glancing from the heap of tangled metal that was the Beldam to his friend and back again. "Hey, do you think you can fire lasers out of your eyes? 'Cause -"

There was a screeching hiss from the Beldam, and the needles and scissors suddenly untangled themselves into a long, clattering streak of silver which flew across the web and pinned Danny against it. It was hard to tell through her furious shrieking, but Coraline thought she caught the words 'wretched ghost' and 'lair' in amongst the rusty-metal noises. Whatever Danny had done to zap her, he didn't seem to know how to do it again. "Tucker! Thermos!"

"Way ahead of you!" Tucker brandished the silver cylinder like a broadsword, before aiming it at the Beldam and pressing a button. The beam of blue light shot out of it, and the Beldam recoiled with a hiss. Tucker looked down at the device and thumped it. "It's not working. Why isn't it -"

"Because she's not a ghost!" Coraline cast around wildly, looking for something to fight the Beldam off with. The web yielded nothing, and she resorted to shouting. "Hey, you witch! Leave him alone! I'm the one you want."

The scissors stopped clacking open and closed, the needles stopped scrabbling, and the legs froze, one only inches away from Danny's face. The Beldam's head whipped around, those gleaming button eyes fixing themselves on Coraline, and her long neck snaked forward, bringing them face to face.

"What makes you think I want such an ungrateful, selfish, spoiled little girl as _you_?" the Beldam asked, and her voice was low and sweet and dangerous.

Coraline swallowed hard. "You d-don't?" _Damn_, she thought she'd gotten rid of that stutter years ago! It only came out when she was feeling particularly afraid or off-balance, which was of course just when she needed her voice to be steady.

"Why would I?" the Beldam repeated. "Of course, now that you're here…"

"Then you didn't set this up to lure me back? You didn't want a rematch?"

Coraline hadn't thought it was possible for a face made entirely of angles and blades and buttons to change expressions, but she could swear that the Beldam looked confused. It passed in a flicker, but Coraline knew that the Beldam had no idea what she was talking about.

"Where's Sam?" Danny demanded, and apparently that was enough motivation to master his newfound power of glowing laser blasts. The white world around them lit up with a faint green glow, and the Beldam laughed.

"Is that what this is all about? A missing friend?" She backed away from Coraline a little, smiling a smile that was nothing more than a needle-lined gash in her razorblade face. "I don't have anyone_, darling_. Ever since _someone_ stole all of my power sources, I've been too weak to build a snare. It's so kind of you to come to me of your own accord."

"So it _was_ a trap." Coraline breathed out a sigh of what was probably premature relief. "You just put the doll in Sam's attic so I'd come looking for you, didn't you?"

It only lasted for a fraction of a second, but once again, the Beldam looked confused. Coraline tried to swallow down the rising dread. "You…_did_ put the doll there, didn't you."

One gleaming silver hand was raised and pressed dramatically to the place where the Beldam's heart should have been. "You _took_ my _power source_. I can't build anything in _this_ world; what makes you think I can touch yours?" There was a sawtoothed growl under her words.

"But -" Coraline felt like her heart was sinking through the soles of her shoes. "But it had to be you! The doll was _your_ spy, and – and you're a sore loser -"

The Beldam straightened up, impossibly tall and imposingly bright. "Who says only two can play a game?"

"But there wasn't anybody else but -" Coraline paused. "_Oh_."

"I do not like the sound of that 'oh'," Tucker said, warily.

"We've gotta go." Coraline started to scramble up the web, only to feel her pant leg catch on something. She looked down, tugging at it, and saw that a sharp silver leg had pinned it against the web.

The Beldam grinned. "I think not."

The needles of her left hand flashed in the light as she raised it to Coraline's eye.


	18. Chapter 18

Coraline didn't waste time screaming. Instead, she kicked out, hard. The Beldam screeched and let go of her face, but her foot caught in the Beldam's ribcage, twisted scissor-blades twining in around her ankle and holding her fast.

_That_ was when she screamed.

"Let go of her!" Danny shouted, hurling a globe of explosive green at the other mother. The Beldam made a disgusted noise and spun around, dragging Coraline off of the web and then releasing her foot, sending her crashing headlong into Danny. The web shuddered and jumped, metal joints wailing.

There was a thump, and the other mother screeched almost exactly like a sewing machine when its thread tangles in its inner workings mid-stitch. Coraline hit the bottom of the web, making it bounce and shiver, and she rolled, expecting the Beldam to drop on her at any moment.

She hadn't counted on her friends. Apparently, neither had the Beldam, who was too busy thrashing around trying to dislodge Tucker from where he was now perched on her spidery abdomen to bother about Coraline.

"You _wretched_ children!"

"Go for the eyes!" Coraline shouted, and Tucker nodded, unhooking one hand from its death grip on one of the other mother's exposed ribs. "They're just sewn on, so if you can pull them off -"

"Not this time," the Beldam hissed, and it might've gone very badly for them all if Danny hadn't suddenly figured out how to aim his blasts.

In between the angry screeches and the bright green blasts, Tucker managed to jump from the Beldam's back, out of the line of fire, landing on the web above Coraline. The impact made the web shudder again, knocking her down just as she was starting to regain her feet. "Ow!"

"Sorry," Tucker said quickly, offering a hand to help her up again. "Well, it looks like this was a bust."

There was a sizzle as one of Danny's blasts scorched the top of the Beldam's head, leaving a smoking bald spot in its wake.

"Definitely a bust," Coraline agreed. "We've got to get out of here. Do you think -"

She was cut off by a cackling laugh from above, and looked up straight into the Beldam's gleaming eyes. "Do you really think you can escape that easily?"

"Yes?"

"You're forgetting the most important thing," the Beldam said, and her voice was almost sweet when she sing-songed, "There's only one key. And oh! You don't have it." One spindly, spidery hand reached down and patted her patronizingly on the head.

"Neither do you," Coraline retorted, swatting away the hand. Before the Beldam had a chance to react beyond a hiss of displeasure, Coraline flung herself flat against the web behind her. "It's up in the lock. And by the way, I've still got your right hand."

The Beldam didn't screech. She just lunged at Coraline, head still smoking slightly and both the hand of pins and the empty wrist outstretched. Coraline tucked her arms in and rolled sideways along the web, feeling it shake as the witch slammed into it, and let herself be bounced forward into the opposite side of the web. As soon as she hit the metal, she grabbed hold, wincing when her fingers slammed into the bars, and started to climb.

There was a clatter of metal from behind and below her, and Coraline spun, dangling from the web by one hand, to see the Beldam furiously battering at the web. Two of her ribs and one spiny leg had tangled in the webbing, and she thrashed around madly trying to free herself. Tucker dodged out of the way of one flailing leg, scrambling upwards after Coraline.

For a few tense seconds, the little world went quiet, as the Beldam worked to extricate herself from the web, apparently too incandescently angry to say a word. She was not, however, too angry to refrain from occasionally growling or shrieking in such a way that Coraline stopped every time she did, heart racing, and had to look back to make sure the Beldam wasn't coming rocketing up the web after her and Tucker. Up above, Danny swung the door open, before swooping down to blast one silver leg that came scything up towards the climbers.

"Get back to the Specter Speeder, I've got your back!" he shouted over his shoulder, letting loose a barrage of poison-green blasts. He pulled up sharp, however, when the last one fizzled out in his hand. "Or, maybe I don't." He shook the offending appendage, but only managed to work up a faint greenish glow.

The Beldam's shattered face split into a huge, needle-sharp grin. "Did you honestly think you could escape _walking straight into my web_ for the _second_ time?"

"I don't know. Do you ever stop talking?" Tucker quipped, as Danny banged his right fist against his open left palm. "Dude, forget it, let's just get out of here before -"

The Beldam lunged, in one quicksilver movement, shooting up the web to swipe at Danny with one spear-like leg. Danny yelped, dodging to one side, and sped around the web, diving out of the way of the Beldam's thrashing limbs. Coraline tried to start climbing again, only to have to stop and grab onto the web when the Beldam slammed into it again, nearly shaking her off. Tucker didn't even try to move, clinging to the web for dear life.

A loud, angry screech was the only warning she got before the Beldam smashed into the web just below her feet. Coraline swung herself up on the thin metal band she was clinging to, wincing as the edge bit into her hands. A hand grabbed her by the shoulder, and she was promptly hoisted straight up into the air.

Coraline screeched, trying to hang onto the web. From directly above her, Danny's voice said, "Hey, I'm trying to get you out of here!"

Coraline let go of the web, just as the Beldam's hand scraped over the metal in the place where her foot had been, missing by inches. Her howl of rage drowned out the high-pitched scream that Tucker let out when Danny flew over and scooped him up with the hand that wasn't holding Coraline.

"Time to go," Danny said, raising his voice over the loud and angry metallic screeches from below. Whether they came from the Beldam's throat or her bright steel body against the rusty web, Coraline could no longer tell. They cut off abruptly as the three flew up and through the open door, which slammed behind them.

"Wait!" Coraline shouted, as Danny soared towards the Specter Speeder. He pulled up short in midair, and Coraline reached back to turn the key in the lock, just as something heavy hit the door at high speed. Coraline pulled the key from the lock, and couldn't help a little smile. They'd all gotten out alive and unbuttoned.

They landed back in their seats in the Specter Speeder, Danny phasing the three of them through the roof. It tingled faintly as Coraline passed through it, sending cold shivers up and down her spine.

Danny dropped heavily into his seat, transforming back to human in a flash of white light."Okay, can someone please tell me what just happened?"

"That was your other mother, right?" Tucker asked, hesitantly. "I mean, not that your mother is anything like that. I'm sure your mother is a very nice lady and not a deranged metal spider-monster."

"She's _not_ my other mother. She just pretends to be people's mothers," Coraline grumbled. "But yeah, that was her."

"I thought she made creepy replicas of people's houses to lure them in."

"She _does_."

"Then why did we walk into a web?" Danny asked, pressing the button for the ignition. The Specter Speeder rumbled to life.

"Because she didn't take Sam."

"Whoa, wait." Tucker held up both hands. "First you say it's definitely her, then you say it isn't?"

"No," Coraline growled. "I thought it was her, but I was wrong! But now I know what's going on, and I'm not wrong this time. I wasn't thinking." She could have bashed her head against the dashboard. "It's a game she and I play," she quoted, half to herself.

"Uh, what?"

"There's a third player. Always has been. And I should have known that the other mother couldn't make a new playing field, not after it all crumbled when I took the other children's eyes away."

"Okay, that's both ew _and_ yikes," Tucker said decisively.

"So what now?" Danny asked. "We're right back to square one, we still don't know where Sam is or how to get there –"

"Yes we do." Coraline waved the key in front of her face. "There's only one key, but there are two doors it opens. One of them is here. So the other one has to be in the real world."

"Wait. You mean we just missed the door in Sam's house? We had to stare at the Box Ghost's butt for nearly an hour for _nothing_?" Tucker groaned. "I hope you know I am never going to be able to get that image out of my head."

"That can't be right." Suddenly, her confidence felt very misplaced.

"You said it was a game, right?"Danny suggested. "Maybe it's part of the game. And we've got to find six more keys before we can win."

Tucker laughed. Coraline didn't. If it was supposed to be a joke, she didn't get it.

"No, it makes sense," Tucker said, thoughtfully, between chuckles. "It really is like Doomed. If we don't collect the items, we can't move on to the next level. We beat the boss and got the key, so now we get to level up."

Coraline opened her mouth to object, and paused. "Actually, that _does_ make sense."

"See? Told you my gaming expertise would come in handy."

"Yeah, that's great, Tuck," Danny agreed, throwing the Specter Speeder into drive. "But how do we find the final boss?"

"Leave that to me," Coraline answered, with slightly more conviction than she felt.

Tucker frowned. "No offense, but last time we left it to you, we almost got turned into spider-chow."

"Trust me, that _won't_ happen again." Coraline's fingers closed around the stone with a hole in it. "When we get back, I'm calling my friend Wybie. He'll know where your 'final boss' is."

"Why would he know?"

"Because it's his cat."

* * *

AN: I apologise profusely for neglecting this fic. A combination of real life and a new fandom took me out for a bit. Thank you to everyone who stuck around, and who read and enjoyed.


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